‘The Country is Thundering’: We Hail the King

This chapter turns to the indabas and pitsos that were staged in the Union, the High Commission Territories, and Rhodesias that provided such striking photographic and cinematographic opportunities over the course of several royal visits. The spectacle of a 4000-strong troupe of Zulu dancers performing the Ngoma Umkosi (royal dance) in Zululand in 1947, the pageantry of a ‘native regatta’ on the Zambezi River, or hordes of blanketed Basuto horse-riders escorting the royal entourages to the great pitso—regular features of twentieth century royal visits—were excitedly anticipated by royal tourists, officials, African chiefs, kings, and commoners. But whereas they were intended to visually represent and thereby confirm the political hierarchy, the chapter uncovers the presence of competing agendas and occasionally subversive uses made of such ceremonial encounters. They offered to performers, chiefs, and commoners alike the opportunities to celebrate their cultural heritage through dance and song in casts of thousands, assert racial pride, claim precedence, or contest government policy, while also providing, momentary carnivalesque escape from the everyday world of racial hierarchy and tension in the ‘reserves’ and protectorates. However degraded their status and denuded their power, chiefs and paramounts revelled, for the moment, in representing themselves as monarchs and kings, equivalent to the visiting British monarch, and as more than the ‘lackeys’ of Union and colonial officials. At indabas, unexpected diversions from immaculately planned programmes might take place. It was at the spectacular Maseru pitso in 1947 that Lekhotla la Bafo (Council of Commoners) presented an address to King George Vl, calling on him to renounce all measures ‘which today deprive the Basuto people of their land and other rights’, while the ostensibly tightly controlled Pietersburg indaba in the Northern Transvaal (today’s Polokwane in Limpopo province) collapsed in chaos. The chapter looks too at the dilemmas posed for the Amarespectables, who used indabas to invoke memories of independent African polities and past glories, but who bridled at the essentialist representations of African culture, the dominance of ‘tribal gatherings’ in the tour’s programmes, and the lack of consultation with African leaders in the planning of these events and the preparation of speeches for the King that endorsed segregationist institutions or controversial schemes of agricultural betterment.