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).
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 Sixth Pageant (c, 1800).
Mugodo is the instrument of an inexorable fate. His faith in his fellow men, in his councillors, even in his sons, has been shattered. He muses that women also are faithless. But their faith, however unfaithful, keeps them falsely true; they intrigue against him as their husband, but they are loyal to him as their king. Above all, their mystery is allied to a power, not to blast the tribe to fragments, but to subdue men and turn their passions to the service of the state. That is the vision given to Mugodo, and the guarantee of its divine origin is the far-off past in which Dzugudini originated the tribe. That past also suggests how the vision can be realized. And in the scene before us these mighty issues are handled with a simplicity and a directness which it is impossible to reproduce.

Mugodo betakes himself to his favourite daughter at Maulwi, sacred reminder of the mountain in Rhodesia. Simply he tells her of his purpose, but she doubts its divine source: Tt cannot be, my father,’ she says; ‘these things are too difficult.’ Mugodo goes again to her, but she remains mystified that a sin that defiles can be a rite that sanctifies.

Then Mugodo goes to Lekhwareni, the despised place of stones and of slothful people (for, according to their praise song, they burn their nails roasting the maize that they should have stamped). There lives Mujaji, daughter of his wife, Mamujaji. To her also he confides his vision; he tells her she will be queen if, though celibate, she will bear the heir to the throne. He is not speaking of a virgin birth, for she understands that he, her father, will be the father of her issue. ‘You are allwise, O father,* she replies, ‘I am the servant of your will.' A secret hut is built; an inquisitive intruder, the favourite wife of Mugodo, suffers the extreme penalty; and in due course a son, not a daughter, is born.

But Fate tricks Mugodo in vain. The son is strangled and a little later there is a daughter. She is to become Mujaji II.

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 Sixth Pageant (c. 1800).
Mugodo is the instrument of an inexorable fate. His faith in his fellow men, in his councillors, even in his sons, has been shattered. He muses that women also are faithless. But their faith, however unfaithful, keeps them falsely true; they intrigue against him as their husband, but they are loyal to him as their king. Above all, their mystery is allied to a power, not to blast the tribe to fragments, but to subdue men and turn their passions to the service of the state. That is the vision given to Mugodo, and the guarantee of its divine origin is the far-off past in which Dzugudini originated the tribe. That past also suggests how the vision can be realized. And in the scene before us these mighty issues are handled with a simplicity and a directness which it is impossible to reproduce.

Mugodo betakes himself to his favourite daughter at Maulwi, sacred reminder of the mountain in Rhodesia. Simply he tells her of his purpose, but she doubts its divine source: 'It cannot be, my father,’ she says; ‘these things are too difficult.’ Mugodo goes again to her, but she remains mystified that a sin that defiles can be a rite that sanctifies.

Then Mugodo goes to Lekhwareni, the despised place of stones and of slothful people (for, according to their praise song, they burn their nails roasting the maize that they should have stamped). There lives Mujaji, daughter of his wife, Mamujaji. To her also he confides his vision; he tells her she will be queen if, though celibate, she will bear the heir to the throne. He is not speaking of a virgin birth, for she understands that he, her father, will be the father of her issue. ‘You are allwise, O father,* she replies, ‘I am the servant of your will.' A secret hut is built; an inquisitive intruder, the favourite wife of Mugodo, suffers the extreme penalty; and in due course a son, not a daughter, is born.

But Fate tricks Mugodo in vain. The son is strangled and a little later there is a daughter. She is to become Mujaji II.

The Seventh Pageant (c. 1850).
Mujaji I has already been on her resplendent throne for half a century; she has turned the chaos of her predecessor’s reign to peace and prosperity; and, surrounded by restrictions which forced her into seclusion and fostered the idea of her sagacity and immortality, she has won the fame and attraction which drew so many foreigners to her capital. She is ‘the white-faced Mankhadeni, radiant as the setting sun’. ‘Huckster in her hut’, perched like an eagle’s eyrie on the fringe of a forest, she dispenses as she wishes the lifegiving rain. ‘She casts away some; others she shares with the vultures.'

Hosts of foreign ambassadors and potentates gather at her court. Some bring cattle, others their daughters or sisters; these are the gifts with which they show their homage or supplicate for rain. In the company we see messengers from Manukuza, dread monarch of Gasaland, supplicating with mighty gifts from their master; ambassadors of Zwide, challenger of Chaka himself, seeking to ward off the chastisement of locusts and drought, but smitten to death for his presumption in coming so near Uulovedu; and also an envoy from Moshesh in far-off Basutoland. Less pretentious are the men from Malevoxo, whose Lovedu wife had taught him the elements of the magic of rain-making; from Vendaland, where they call Mujaji ‘the wife who brings them water to wash their face’; from Phalavorwa, upon whose internal struggles Mujaji arbitrates. From Chopiland and Lunyai, from the Uirwa and Tswana, from the very ends of the world, there are suppliants. Sekwati, the great Pedi king, is seeking a matrimonial alliance, hence that herd of cattle in the courtyard; Mali of the Khaha and Magaepia of the Letswalo, queens crowned in their own countries in imitation of the immortal Mujaji, come to be strengthened and fitted for their task. But the mightiest tribute of all is the gift from the Zulu king, who, disappointed by the failure of his mission to the great Swazi rain-maker, supplicates the rain-maker of rain-makers.

The pageant is incomplete without its background, the armed hordes of Chaka and Moselekatse, of Soshangane and Mantatisi, of Thulare and Mafefe, laying waste and massacring, and in the wake of the trail of desolation, the smaller tribes and those miserable remnants, the guerrilla bands of cannibals, completing the destruction. They all are mightier than Mujaji, who is unarmed yet invincible. And, as the pageant passes by, we see innumerable refugees flocking from all points of the compass to seek sanctuary in the inviolable land.
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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 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. http://rainqueensofafrica.com/2011/03/the-rain-queen-and-the-lobedu...