Bhengu in the sources
Bhengu (Bengu in Bryant’s spelling) is the royal salutation of the amaNgcolosi, from which the Ngcobo, Nyuswa and other Lala clans later split.
What the sources say
Soga. He writes of “one large section of the Ama-Lala, namely the Ama-Ngcolosi, whose salutations, Bengu and Nyuswa, find no place in the genealogical tables of other prominent Lala tribes”, adds that the offshoots Ngcobo, Nyuswa and Qadi “do not use the Ngcolosi salutation Bengu or Bhengu (Zulu orthography)” but the name Ngcobo, and says he drew the salutations from Bryant’s Zulu-English dictionary (pp. 73–4).
Bryant. He gives a Ngcolosi line in which Mmepo, son of Ngwane, descends “of Ngwabini, of Bengu, of Dlabazane, of Lusibalukulu, of Songololo”, with Bengu dated to about 1761 (the Ngcolosi section), and his clan table lists Bengu as an address-name.
Related pages. See Ngcobo.
Cautions
Both authors treat Bhengu as an ancestral name used as a salutation, not as a full clan history. The relationship between the many families that now carry Bhengu as a surname and the Ngcolosi is not worked out in these sources. Bryant was a Catholic missionary who collected clan traditions in the early twentieth century; he writes in a jocular colonial style, dates early generations by a rule of eighteen years to a reign, and often says he is guessing. We give his statements as his. Soga was a Xhosa-born mission doctor and historian who wrote in 1930 from informants and older colonial histories; his tables are partly garbled in the machine-read text.
Izithakazelo and totem
The salutation is given in the sources; for your own family’s fuller izithakazelo, we would like to record them, credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London: Longmans, 1929); read in the Internet Archive text, including its alphabetical table of clan names and address-names near the end (machine-read, with garbled columns)
- J. H. Soga, The South-Eastern Bantu (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1930); Internet Archive text
Do you belong to the Bhengu? 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.