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 KINGS

The Fourth Pageant (c. 1750-1800).
Pheduli’s grave stands beside those of his forefathers. The scene discloses Khiali, the fair-faced king, reclining in a seat hewn out of the rock on the summit of a mountain amid immense walls of stone. In the spirit in which the scene is portrayed, with its mounds of masonry and its structures of stone, the impression conveyed is one of Zimbabwic splendour. (The ruins are still there, phallic stones projecting from rough stone walls some 8 ft. high, and the sculptured seat is merely two rocks in their natural position. But it is with the spirit, not the reality of the scene that we are concerned.)

Khiali does not notice those faint figures of foreigners crowding into the background. They are the Sotho invaders of the lowveld, pressing over the mountains in the south, clambering down the escarpment in the west, and in far-off Phalavorwa settling in an unfavourable environment, whence some would soon leave to encroach upon UuLovedu. On his magnificent material foundations Khiali is concerned to build a strong spiritual edifice. His predecessors were content to entrust the welfare of the divine prince, he who should ascend the throne, to the care of the gods. But he, Khiali, by strengthening the hands of the gods, would secure for ever the succession of the sacred heir.

As Khiali sits there, a youth, obviously concerned to avoid detection, appears in the shadows of an opening in the fence. He slinks away when he sees others beside Khiali in the courtyard. A moment later he reappears, only to be driven back by Khiali, showering curses upon his head. But later we see Khiali and the youth whispering together in the king’s private hut; the king is secretly teaching him the use of the rain charms. The youth is Mugodo the Outcast, youngest son of Khiali His father stints him of everything, makes him dwell far from the capital, treats him like a thief, and refuses him entry into his village except when he comes alone and unobserved by a secret pathway through the undergrowth. These things he does to deceive the people and safeguard Mugodo’s title to the throne. But they also develop a super sensitiveness in the Outcast.

Thwarted in his youth, Mugodo suffers irreparable damage to his self-respect ; he is obsessed by suspicions ; he imagines that every man's hand is against him. His councillors are adulterers and sorcerers, corrupting his wives, plotting to usurp his position. Scandal and dissension sap the strength of the kingdom. His elder brother, Khashani, rises against him; he is driven off, but the tribe splits into two; and more than a century later, in the second cycle, a descendant of Khashani challenges Mujaji with a foreign creed. Mugodo answers his detractors with wholesale executions, but he is concerned to vindicate himself rather than to regain order in the land. In a civil strife between two of his headmen, he makes no move until he feels himself insulted by ‘the rusty arrows fit for the rubbish heap’ that cause the blood of a kinsman to flow. The crowning catastrophe that embitters his soul is the conduct of his wayward sons. They enter the huts of his younger wives; they slaughter his cattle to gain popularity at their father’s expense; they send him the dregs after draining the tributary beer.

And Mugodo’s reign ends in chaos and confusion. Royal kinsmen massacre one another; internecine strife is followed by unparalleled famine; ravenous wild beasts terrorize the villages; Malegudu, one of Mugodo’s sons, gains control for a time, but he has eventually to flee before Mujaji, his sister, and is assassinated in Vendaland; Khiebe, another son, seeks refuge in Thovololand, where he dies an unnatural death; Sephumulo, a powerful noble, unable to stomach subjection to Mujaji, who is gaining the ascendancy, severs his allegiance and establishes the twin tribes of Rakwadu and Sekhopo. And as these disasters befall the tribe, the first cycle completes its course.

THE CYCLE OF THE QUEENS
The Fifth Pageant (c. 1800).
As the second cycle opens, the disasters which appear to be the Nemesis upon the vice of an uncertain succession (for it was Khiali’s attempt to readjust the machinery of succession which maladjusted Mugodo for the task of a king) are reconstructed to form a chain of triumph for Mujaji. The most dramatic moments are not the disasters, but two interconnected events: Mugodo’s prophecy and Mugodo's sin.

At the end of the civil strife, into which the insult of the rusty arrows goads Mugodo to throw his decisive weight, he orders the war horns to be sounded ; and as he begins a solitary, spectacular dance (hu pebela) his people, prostrating themselves, solemnly intone his praises: ‘Mugodo of the neck-with-great-folds-of-fat, wherein do rest both goods and men, who hurls his challenge with the rain-horn; Mugodo of Pheduli, Transformer of the Clouds, he kills as he lists and spares whom he likes.’ Pointing in the four directions, he raises his voice in prophecy: ‘I am going away to creep into the horn of a cow (i.e. to die). I do not like to sleep in the open, vainly counting the stars. I go to unloose the black ants in the east. They will bite you and kill you, but in the end you will overcome them. Thereafter I shall unleash the red ants in the west; you will fight them, but you will fight them in vain. Further, I say this country will be ruled by a frontal skirt.’

It is Mugodo’s farewell message just before he dies. But the prophecy epitomizes the three great moments in the cycle of queens : the accession of a woman, the raids of Dguni hordes (black ants), and the conquest by the European (red ants).

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 Dzunginidini Dzugundini, that according to the wishes of the spirits, 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:
http://rainqueensofafrica.com/2011/03/the-rain-queen-and-the-lobedu...