A Chief is a Chief by the Grace of His People
Once we had Leaders
Max du Preez
Tafelberg
In the evening, I sent for Moshesh again to come to me. Moshesh came, but this time dressed like an ordinary kaffir, that is, not in European clothes.
When he came in, I called to him:
‘Why is Moshesh so long coming? Can’t he come when I send for him?’
Moshesh answered: ‘I am Moshesh.’
‘Oh’, said I.
- Paul Kruger on his visit to Thaba Bosiu in 1857 to negotiate with the Basotho king Moshoeshoe on behalf of the Republic of the Orange Free State. Kruger, who later became the president of the Transvaal Republic, was 32 at the time, Moshoeshoe 70.[1]
A monumental failure
There is probably only one topic on which there is presently complete consensus among analysts, commentators and the public: the South African malaise of the last few years can largely be ascribed to what Dr Mamphela Ramphele has called a ‘monumental failure of leadership’.
Politicians and their acolytes often attempt to divert the attention from this accusation by talking about Africa being misunderstood or by blaming colonialism, apartheid, neoliberalism and/or the white minority’s ‘undermining’ of the post-1994 democracy.
Many writers on leadership refer to statesmen like Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill or business leaders like Lee Iacocca and Steve Jobs as examples of great leaders.
And yet southern Africa has a rich crop of exemplary, sometimes spectacular, leaders in its precolonial and early colonial past. Men and women of vision, wisdom, courage and principle.
Why would South Africans look outside the subcontinent for role models when there are so many right here at home?
There is probably a good psychological reason for this that must have something to do with our inferiority complex – and for the fact that when we do recall great leaders from our past, we tend to go to aggressive, military men like King Shaka, Chief Mzilikazi or General Christiaan de Wet.
But another reason is that we as South Africans have yet to fully reclaim our history from the clutches of colonialist and Afrikaner nationalist historians. Far too few scholars are engaged in rediscovering and reinterpreting the people and stories of our subcontinent’s past.
A major stumbling block, of course, is that precolonial African societies did not read and write. This means that we have to explore oral history, which can sometimes be somewhat problematic, and read the versions of colonialists, missionaries and other white historians, applying several filters as we do so in order to get to the truth distorted by prejudice, arrogance and ignorance.
When we do explore the leadership qualities, styles and vision of some of southern Africa’s kings, chiefs and political philosophers of yesterday, we find that present leaders’ excuses of colonialism, apartheid, Western imperialism, capitalism, white intransigence and neoliberalism become very thin indeed.
1. Paul Kruger: The Memoirs of Paul Kruger (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), p 69
A savage prince and a formidable adversary
In our search for indigenous leadership models, we could look at leaders like Chief Maqoma (1798-1873), the right-hand son of Ngqika, king of the Rharhabe division of the Xhosa people.
Maqoma was, by all oral and written accounts, a man of special intellect, insight, bravery and charisma; a leader, a diplomat and a guerrilla tactician who fought in all ways available to him to save his people from the ravages of colonialism. And yet the colonial authorities and some missionaries made him out to be a hopeless drunk, a charge that was clearly untrue.
Noël Mostert says this about Maqoma in his formidable tome on Xhosa history, Frontiers: ‘Of all the Xhosa chiefs who stood in the arena as the Xhosa nation entered this central and decisive period of its confrontation with the Cape Colony and the British army, Maqoma alone was seen by all as indisputably the greatest leader, the potential organiser of Xhosa military power, and the likeliest indigenous victor, if there was to be one.’[2]
The British military officer Colonel Richard Collins said Maqoma was ‘a noble specimen of a savage prince, capable of being moulded into a Christian hero’.[3] But Chief Maqoma was harassed and frustrated by ruthless British colonial governors and military men his whole adult life and eventually crushed, with Sir George Grey especially seeing it as his mission to destroy Maqoma. He could therefore never actualise his full potential as a leader and statesman.
The chief was tried in a farcical court on trumped-up charges and was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour on Robben Island, arriving there in December 1857. After he was released in 1869, he went farming, but when the colonial government realised that he was never going to be its puppet and that his mere presence still meant something to the Xhosa people, he was sent back to the island. He died there on 9 September 1873. On 13 August 1978 his remains were taken to the eastern Cape and reburied in the Heroes’ Acre on top of the Amatolas with some 15 000 people in attendance.
We could also consider King Sekhukhune (1814-1882) of the Bapedi as a worthy role model. He fought valiantly against a two-pronged assault on his people’s independence by the British and the Boers of the Transvaal Republic. He refused to be Christianised and expelled the white missionaries from his kingdom, vowing to protect the spiritual and cultural integrity of what was then called the Marota kingdom between the Vaal and Limpopo Rivers.
Sekhukhune’s army repelled four huge attacks from the Boers and the British between 1876 and 1879, but he was eventually captured after a major force of British and Swazi troops defeated his warriors. He was jailed in Pretoria, but assassinated by his half-brother Mampuru after his release in 1882.
Unusually, the London Times of 30 August 1882 wrote an almost glowing obituary of the ‘formidable’ Sekhukhune. ‘We hear this morning from Durban of the death of one of the bravest of our former enemies, the Chief Sekhukhune . . . The news carries us some years back to the time when the name of Sekhukhune was a name of dread, first to the Dutch and then to the English Colonists of the Transvaal and Natal.’
As with Maqoma, we don’t know how Sekhukhune would have developed further as a leader if the colonial powers hadn’t quashed him.
2. Noël Mostert: Frontiers – The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (London: Jonathan Cape,