Ngcobo in the sources
The Ngcobo are, in Bryant’s 1929 history, one of the large Tonga-Nguni (Lala group) clans of the lower Tukela valley, whose founder he names as Vumezita and whose branches included the Nyuswa, Qadi, Ngongoma, Shangase and Wosiyana in Zululand and the Fuze in Natal. His estimate of their numbers in the early nineteenth century, about 8,200, puts them among the largest clans of that country.
What the sources say
Origins. Bryant says the Ngcobo chose as founder “one Vumezita”; where he lived and where he came from the clan could not say, only point “up north” towards Tongaland. Vumezita, he says, and his offspring were not of the Ntungwa type, like the Zulus, but belonged to the Tonga-Nguni branch of the Nguni, and to the Lala group of it, so that their nearest cousins were the Mtetwa on one side and the Debe on the other (ch. 46, p. 479). He adds that the clan’s numerous branches grew from two sons of Vumezita, Ngcobo and Mkeshane.
The brothers. In the story Bryant tells, Ngcobo, the elder, tested whether his wives would marry his brother Mkeshane after his death, and when they said yes plotted his removal; Mkeshane fled, was later sought out by an army sent by remorseful Ngcobo, and when Ngcobo asked where he had been, replied that he had been roaming; the elder said, “you have been roaming, you rover (impela-wawu-shanga)”, and from then on his people were called Shangase, “the rover”. Bryant thinks the story describes an incident in an earlier homeland farther north along the coast (pp. 479 to 480). See the Shangase pages for the branch.
Branches. Ngcobo’s only son, Dingila, had three wives of different standing, the great wife, her “substitute” (iNqadi) and the guardian of the paternal grave (isiZinda), and from their three eldest sons, Nyuswa, Ngotoma (Ngotoba) and Gasela, came, Bryant says, the aba-kwa-Nyuswa (the paramount house), the emaQadini (second in rank) and the aba-kwa-Fuze (the guardian house) (p. 480). He lists the Nyuswa chiefs as Maguya, Mbele, Mapoloba, Sihayo, Dubuyana, Deliweyo and Mqedi, “living paramount chief of all the Ngcobo tribe” in 1929, and dates Maguya’s death to about 1787 and the clan’s arrival in the Tukela valley from farther up the coast to about 1700, perhaps pushed out by the Mtetwa from about 1720 (p. 481). He says the Shangase and Wosiyana lived beside the Nyuswa on the Tukela, and that the Shangase broke away to the south bank around 1800.
Under Shaka. Bryant opens his chapter on them with the story of Tondolozi, son of Tayi and head of the emaLangeni “nept” of the Ngcobo tribe, whom Shaka arrested at his new kwaBulawayo kraal in 1824 and then released when Tondolozi’s sisters brought cattle, after which Shaka sent young men to choose mistresses from Tayi’s daughters; Bryant says that mission was a ruse and the party fled (pp. 477 to 479). After Shaka’s wars the Ngcobos, he says, “reassembled, one compact and unseparated tribe”, the emaQadini by the eNanda hill, the Shangase and Wosiyana inland, the Ngongoma across the Mdloti and the Nyuswa beyond (pp. 495 to 496). In his table of the early nineteenth-century population of the Zululand and Natal clans he gives the Ngcobo a ratio of 8, about 8,208 people of a total of 74,898 (p. 82).
Cautions
This is an old, one-source account: Bryant collected the Ngcobo story orally and says of several details that they are guesses, including Nyuswa’s parentage and the order of the chiefs before Maguya. We have not seen the Ngcobo’s own accounts or the Natal Native Affairs Commission evidence he cites. Bryant was a Catholic missionary who collected clan traditions from informants in the early twentieth century; his book is written in a jocular colonial style, uses period terms for Africans that we do not repeat, dates the early generations by a rule of eighteen years to a reign, and often says he is guessing. We give his statements as his, not as settled history.
Izithakazelo and totem
Bryant prints the Ngcobo praise (isithakazelo) as “uNgcobo lomhle, lotima, lokanya ngamatinyo” and glosses it, in his words, as “their beautiful black skin, with the shining white teeth”, a reflection, he says, of the heat of the Tukela valley (p. 478). We found no totem in the sources we read. If you belong to the Ngcobo and recite your own praises, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
See also Zulu.
Do you belong to the Ngcobo? Tell us your izithakazelo and what elders say about the family’s history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.