Do they look
like Cannibals?:
Young Zulu girls doing cultural dance
It was after the Zulu Kingdom when it had lost
independence in 1880s. Tribes were scattered all over Natal running
away from being incorporated under the Zulu kingdom. It was by this time
in 1882 that the Amatuli tribe found a hide away at Bluff. I will
draw an argument from F. Schimlek and the Natal Journal of 1914 about the
first connections between the Africans and the Roman Catholic Trappists.
According to F. Schimlek, the Amatuli tribe under chief
Shozi were the first tribe to come into contact with the Trappists. He
claimed that they had run away from the Zulu king Shaka in the late 1820s.
But what I find confusing about this is that, Schimlek said that " they
were the first to meet the missionaries and were living in bushes or
shrubs and were cannibals"1.
I disagree with Schimlek because if the Amatuli tribe had been near
Pinetown by 1830s they could have been in close contact with white people
of Durban and Pinetown. By 1880s migration was the major force where by
Africa males found themselves in because of the invention of the new
industries. Although it is greatly debated that the Zulus did not want to
work for the whites I think that they could have seen light of the
so called "white civilization" since Africa was referred as the "Dark
Continent"by the Europeans. I do not believe that they lived in bushes
permanently. To contradict my disagreement, in the Natal Journal it is
started that the Trappists met people who were eager to be under
missionaries. They were descent in the sense that they asked father
Francis to be their leader and to build the schools for their children.
How could people who wanted to acquire knowledge be still living in
bushes.
According to A.L Balling, the Natives were dissent people
although they had their unique ways of living. "When they had that they
were to be tenants on our land they became actinic. One of these fortunate
men repeated at least twenty times in broken English 'you my fatha'
"2.
Balling contradicts my point that those people had had some contact with
the whites and could not have been the "Barbaric" presented by Schimlek.
Balling further described something interesting about them "on the second
day we were there, a second grade chief came to me ... when I told this
men that we wanted to educate his children and all the black people's
children in our school and would teach them handcrafts, he jumped a meter
in the air several times... "3.
Here Balling has positively presented the Natives as real people with
conscious and reason.
Concerning the issue of Cannibalism mentioned by Schimlek
, I totally disagree with him. I think he was a confused man because
further on his book he mentioned that the "Natives and the Trappists had a
common interest in burial of dead man, they believed in the immorality of
the soul"4.
I do not think that he meant what he said because if the Natives were
really Cannibals how could they bury their food. Was it possible for them
to eat the bodies yet regarding the immorality of the soul? I do not know
but I doubt it, may be he was right who knows, but he did not expand his
points to support them.
"This section was prepared and
motivated by Philip Kramer"
