The Rain Queen Cycles told by E. JENSEN KRIGE

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.212716/page/n93/mode/2up
THE CYCLE OF THE QUEENS
The Eighth Pageant (1894).
The sceptre, secretly entrusted to Mujaji II on her accession forty years and more before this pageant passes, is the symbol of forces that swayed a bygone world. People are uncertain of their bearings in the new world, their sense of security has been shaken. The black ants from Swaziland have left a scar, though they were chastened when the legions of Ludongo were defeated. Now the red ants are brought upon the scene as the aftermath of the exploits of Albasini, self appointed chief of the Magwamba (Shangana-Tonga) and Native Commissioner of the Boer Republic. The sceptre only weakly shows the force of spiritual power. The tribute Mujaji sends to Albasini, it is true, smites him with drought; upon General Joubert, curious to behold the royal majesty, a far-off sister of the queen, who was also her ‘wife', is palmed off as the mysterious ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed* ; the Transformer of the Clouds still is the ‘huckster in her hut'.

But to the workers and warriors of the ‘red ants’, the sceptre is like a broken reed rather than a magic wand. Some of them with impunity appropriate the country, enlisting in their service the denizens of the soil; others are collecting taxes, exacting tribute and redrawing age-old boundary lines; still others invade the sacred places, even desecrating the drums at Maulwi. The princes still come, but they supplicate surreptitiously.

The temporary triumphs cannot offset the disastrous defeats, and Mujaji, bewildered by the turn of events, does not know how to adjust her weapons and her diplomacy to the needs of the new situation. She circumvents the curiosity of Joubert, but she fails to save her subjects from serfdom. When the grave of Khashani, the Christian kinsman whom she martyred, becomes the rallying point of a disloyal creed, when the conspiracy to expel the European intruder ends in the disaster of the deportation of her neighbours, she loses her faith in the gods of her ancestors and adjures her followers to trust the apostle of a creed that was uprooting these gods. Pathetically she presses the poison cup to her lips, conforming to the letter, not to the spirit, of the ritual end ordained by her ancestors. In a world indifferent to the eternal verities, that cup is like an empty sham and that end like a vain sacrifice.

The pageant passes on. A cheerless panorama unfolds before us as Mujaji III ascends the throne. To submission is added humiliation. When the white man, coming to arrange for the recognition of the new queen, sees old Mathogani, who had impersonated Mujaji II, the proceedings are stopped. The Lovedu are made to pay for their presumption by being denied a ruler until the old woman dies. They retaliate by dubbing her the ‘Chief of the white men’ and by accelerating her end.

But it is a fruitless revenge. They are faced with the problem of reconciling the claims of two incongruous worlds : is the authority of the queen to be derived from the alien conqueror and his ceremonies or from the spirit of the deceased and the rite of the door? The reality of the old rite is the sham of the new order ; it is a mere coincidence upon which no title can be based. But also in all spheres of culture and of life these dualistic forces clash with one another; they are in a death grapple which lasts throughout the reign of Mujaji III.

The conflict is epitomized in the conflict between Shalala and the royal house. The commoner, using the weapons of the European lawyer. ranges himself against royalty, who invoke the powers of their ancestors When Magoma, daughter of the queen, illicitly allies herself to the commoner and anarchy threatens disruption of the tribe, the royal house reluctantly invites intervention of the white man, submitting, however, only the superficial issues. Ostensibly Shalala suffers defeat, but in reality the struggle continues ; and in this conflict, as in the wider conflict of the warring worlds, we are left in doubt where the victory lies.

The Rain Queens of South Africa

According to legend, a Kranga chief named Mugodo was warned by his ancestral spirits of a plot by his sons to overthrow him. He had them killed and told his daughter Dzugundini, that according to the wishes of the sprits, he must marry her and father a girl child. By doing this he ensured that the new heir to his throne would be a Queen and thus a new dynasty of woman founded. The ancestors bestowed onto the princess rainmaking powers, which expanded the wealth of the kingdom. When Dzugundini gave birth to a son fathered by her father, the child was strangled. Her second child was a girl, which signalled the start of the female dynasty.

Masalandbo Modjaji, Rain Queen II (1854-94)

Masalanabo Modjadji II succeeded her mother Modjadji I to become the second Rain Queen. Like her mother she never married the father of her children, but was cared for by a number of “wife’s”. The Queen was practically inaccessible to her people, appeared seldom in public and is said to have had the mystical power to transform clouds into rain. She committed ritual suicide in 1894 after having designated the daughter of her sister and great wife Leakkali as heir.

http://rainqueensofafrica.com/2011/03/the-rain-queen-and-the-lobedu... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masalanabo_Modjadji

She is said to have been the inspiration for Rider Haggard's novel: 'She'