The Tembe kingdom
Wikipedia describes the Tembe Kingdom as centred on Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay) and covering coastal southern Mozambique and north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal (Maputaland), including the Kosi Bay and Manguzi areas and inland toward the lower Lubombo mountains. The Wikipedia article on the Tsonga calls the Tembe one of the most influential nations on the east coast, and says that clans such as the Dlamini, Gumede, Mashabane, Matshinye and Nyaka identify with them.
Origins
The article says the Tembe trace their origins to the Kalanga communities of present-day Zimbabwe, migrating south from the thirteenth century, and notes that some accounts make Tembe a son of Mwali, with pottery at a Tembe cemetery suggesting a link to Mapungubwe. The founding ancestors named in tradition are Sikuke, Ludahumba, Silamboya and Mangobe. The article’s infobox gives about 1554 for the kingdom’s establishment, while the text says Tembe was the first recorded leader in the 1500s, so the early dates are uncertain. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Tembe had a recognised coastal lowland kingdom that had absorbed Tsonga influences.
Rulers as recorded
The first verifiable ruler is Sikuke (about 1692 to 1710), followed by Ludahumba (1710 to 1728), Silamboya (1728 to 1746) and Mangobe (1746 to 1764). After a split in 1746 the Matutwen-Tembe settled west of the Maputo River and the Mabudu-Tembe east of it. Mabudu (1764 to 1782), the founder of the Mabudu line, is said to have taken power from his older brother, Crown Prince Nkupo II. The article then lists Mwayi (1782 to 1800), Makasana (1800 to 1854), Noziyingile (1854 to 1886), Queen Zambili Dlamini as regent (1886 to 1894), and Ngwanase (1894 to 1928), founder of the modern Ngwanase-Tembe branch, followed by Mhlupeki and Mzimba. By the early 1800s the Mabudu territory reportedly ran from the Maputo River to the Indian Ocean and from Delagoa Bay south to Lake St Lucia.
Trade and the Portuguese
Portuguese, Dutch and British ships anchored at Delagoa Bay to buy ivory and slaves from the Tembe, and Tembe chiefs exchanged ivory for glass beads, brass and cloth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Portuguese authorities tried to define borders and appoint compliant chiefs, which disrupted Tembe structures. The article says Tembe chiefs negotiated with the colonial authorities and kept control of key coastal trade areas, but gives no detail of specific treaties.
In Junod’s 1912 ethnography
Junod, writing in 1912, describes the Tembe as a clan of the Ronga group south of Delagoa Bay, whose two sub-clans, Matutwen and Maputju, had become independent (about p. 16). Where Wikipedia’s account above leans on later scholarship, his is a missionary’s record of what the Tembe and their neighbours told him and of what Portuguese records showed.
Northern origin. Junod counts the Tembe and the Baloyi as the two clans that “without doubt” came from the north. The tradition he heard is that the Tembe came down to Delagoa Bay from the Kalanga country by the Nkomati river on a floating island of papyrus, crossed the Tembe river and settled south of the Bay, and that the ancestor Tembe placed his sons as governors in every district of the plain, an arrival remembered in an old saying. Tembe people sometimes greet each other with Nkalanga, “man of the North, of the Kalanga country”. Junod calls the story legendary but thinks the northern origin itself is certainly true (about pp. 21 to 23).
The 1554 report. Junod reads a report by the Portuguese chronicler Perestrello, written in 1554, as naming a king “Zembe” whose land lay south of Delagoa Bay and whose river separated it from the dominion of a king Nyaka. He identifies Zembe with the Tembe and the other chiefs it names with the Mpfumo, Lebombo and Manyisa clans, and concludes that these chiefs were already settled round the Bay at least four or five hundred years before his time. He offers this as a landmark in Southern African history, not a scientifically exact statement (about pp. 26 to 27). It is his reading of the report, which we have not seen ourselves.
His chief list. Junod gives the Tembe chiefs as Tembe, Nkupu, Nwangobe, Silambowa, Muhari (1781 to 1795), Mayeta (1823), Bangwana, Bukutje (1857), Mabayi (banished in 1890) and Bukutje II. He adds that Maputju was a younger brother of Muhari who made himself independent, and gives the Maputju line as Muwayi, Makasana (1800 to 1850), Tlhuma, Musongi or Nozililo (1850) and Ngwanazi, who fled to British Amatongaland after the war against Gungunyana in 1895 (about pp. 24 to 25). Several names overlap with the Wikipedia list above (Silambowa with Silamboya, Nkupu with Nkupo, and the sequence Muwayi, Makasana, Nozililo, Ngwanazi with Mwayi, Makasana, Noziyingile, Ngwanase), but Junod files that sequence under the independent Maputju chiefdom and the dates differ in places. We cannot say from these two sources how the lines relate, and Junod warns his lists may be incomplete or mix brothers with sons.
Seniority and praise. Junod records a saying about how the Tembe ancestor and his brothers divided the meat of an ox. Tembe, the elder, ate the chest and held the rank of chief; Sabi (or Mpanyele), the second brother, ate the hindleg and was settled at Mathuthweni; Maputju, the younger, ate the foreleg, revolted against his elder brother and built a kingdom stronger than either. People still taunted the Maputju with their lesser origin: “Tembe ate the breast, Sabi the hindleg and Maputju the foreleg” (about p. 299). He gives the Tembe praise-name as “Mulao Ngolanyama”: the lion that kills and does not eat, the hawk that kills for the hunters, so well fed that it can leave the meat for others (about p. 335), and says subjects crawled on their knees before the Tembe chief calling out Ngolanyama, “Lion” (about p. 357).
The capital and the wars. A fellow Swiss, Dr J. de Montmollin, visited and photographed the Tembe capital in July 1900. Junod describes a high thorny circular fence round the whole village, a front square (hubo) with a single hut, and a back part with the queens’ huts behind a high reed wall that men were forbidden to enter (about pp. 392 to 393). He says the armies of Maputju and Tembe were the first on the plain to be defeated when Soshangane’s people invaded (about p. 424), and that the two armies shared an old war song, which he calls one of the finest.
This section summarises Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, vol. 1, The Social Life (Neuchatel, 1912), read in the Internet Archive scan. Junod was a Swiss missionary writing in 1912 from a missionary’s viewpoint, in his own spelling, and he says himself that his genealogies are probably too short and may mix brothers with sons. Page numbers are approximate, taken from the page markers in machine-scanned text, and we have not checked them against the printed book. Where we match his spelling to a name used today, that is our inference.
Izithakazelo and totem
We have not found a published Tembe praise text or a confirmed totem, so we are not printing either. If you belong to the Tembe and recite your praises, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia: Tembe Kingdom (cites Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, 1927; Mathebula, “Some notes on the early history of the Tembe”, New Contree, 2017; Kloppers, MA thesis on the Mabudu-Tembe, 2003; Hamilton, 1990)
- Wikipedia: Tsonga people
- Henri A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, vol. 1, The Social Life (Neuchatel, 1912)
The main account above rests on Wikipedia; the Junod section is from his 1912 volume 1. We have not read Mathebula, Kloppers or Junod’s later editions first-hand, so check dates against them.
Do you belong to the Tembe? Tell us your praises, your totem and what elders say about the history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.