Faku
Wikipedia describes Faku kaNgqungqushe as king of the amaMpondo, born around 1780 at Vungeni, the royal homestead, and dying on 29 October 1867, aged 86 or 87. It gives his reign as 1818 to 1867 and his mother as Queen Mamngcambe, a Mpondomise princess; see Mpondomise. It gives the praise name Jasele (“he who crushes all”), tied to a defeat of the amaQwabe in 1832, and Sophankomo, he who gives his people cattle. The article draws mainly on Timothy Stapleton’s Faku: Rulership and Colonialism in the Mpondo Kingdom (2006), and presents some of its motives and events as uncertain.
Succession
The article says that about 1810 to 1815 Ngqungqushe was killed fighting the Bomvana regent Gambushe, that the heir was Phakani, but royal councillors intervened and restored Faku’s mother as Great Wife, which legitimised Faku’s claim, and that opposition from Mtengwane, who fled to the Bomvana, was resolved quickly with the help of Faku’s brothers Cingo and Sitata. It says Faku then drove the Bomvana west across the Mbashe into Gcaleka territory under Hintsa; see Bomvana, whose own tradition dates their expulsion from Pondoland to 1837.
Wars and neighbours
- Zulu. It says Shaka’s regiments under Mdlhaka were defeated in 1824, with Faku’s son Ndamase commanding, and that Shaka invaded again in 1828, with Ndamase again leading the defence, and the result was a stalemate. South African History Online says the Qwabe leader Nqetu, who fled Shaka to Pondoland, was killed by Ncapayi.
- Bhaca. It says Ncaphayi‘s group became a semi-autonomous tributary chiefdom in the Mzimvubu area, that Faku married his daughter Dludla to Ncaphayi, and that the alliance broke down by 1845, when Ncaphayi was killed at Nowalala and Makaula succeeded him. See Bhaca; the Bhaca sources we have place the death in 1844, 1845 or 1846.
- Thembu and Ngwane. It says Ngoza’s Thembu invasion was repelled near the Mzimkhulu and that in 1829 Faku’s forces helped King Ngubengcuka’s abaThembu at Mbolompo.
Missionaries, Britain and the division of the kingdom
The article says Faku kept contact with the Cape and Natal through Wesleyan missionaries from the 1830s, using them diplomatically but refusing to join colonial wars; that he signed a treaty with the British under Maitland in 1844; and that in 1854 to 1855 Walter Harding and Henry Francis Fynn obtained his consent to move the Natal boundary into Mpondo land, which Ndamase did not co-sign. It says about 3,000 Griqua settled in the north-east in 1863, which became Griqualand East (see Kok), that Ndamase crossed the Mzimvubu and ruled the west semi-autonomously after about 1845, and that after Faku’s death in 1867 Mqikela succeeded in the east while Ndamase held the west. It names the missionary Thomas Jenkins, whose 1845 to 1852 diary is a key source.
What we have not read
We have not read Stapleton’s book, Peires on the Zulu invasions, Victor Poto Ndamase’s 1927 King in isiXhosa, the James Stuart Archive or Beinart (1982), which Wikipedia cites. The Commission’s Mpondo determination (our Mpondo page) covers the later royal dispute, not Faku’s reign in detail. We found no Mpondo royal-house account of him on a page we could open.
Izithakazelo and totem
The two praise names above are all we have, taken from Wikipedia without a full text, and we have no confirmed totem. If you belong to the Mpondo royal house and recite Faku’s izibongo, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
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