King Faku ka Ngqungqushe

King Faku ka Ngqungqushe was born around 1780 at the Qawukeni Great Palace near a small town called Lusikisiki in the Mpondoland region, which is in the north eastern part of the former Transkei homeland situated in the present-day Eastern Cape, South Africa. From the traditional history of succession, King Faku was not originally born from the great wife who is normally expected to give birth to an heir to the throne of the King according to the customs and tradition of the Mpondo people[1]. Mpondo people are the group of people who previously originated from Natal (now known as KwaZulu-Natal – KZN) before moving to settle in the Eastern Cape in what is now referred to as the Mpondoland region. The Mpondo people fled as they were trying to escape from King Shaka’s wars. However, it is important to state that they are not a sub-section of the Xhosa people as many scholars have often incorrectly referred to the as one of the smaller sub-sections of Xhosa people.

King Faku was the son of King Ngqungqushe one of the early rulers Mpondo kingdom with its organization as a state dating back to the early 1500s. However, literature states that King Faku's mother was one of the many wives that the king had married during his life. Mamngcambe, the mother of King Faku was neither the right-hand wife nor the great wife that bears the heir to the throne of the king.[2]

In 1810 King Faku's father was killed in a battle after intervening in a chiefdom battle between two Bomvana chiefs Gambuzo and Ngezana. The fight between the two Bomvana chiefs was about the rightful heir to the throne of chieftaincy which King Faku’s father saw as an opportunity of taking advantage of the situation by ensuring that supporting one chief to win the battle will give him an upper hand over a neighbouring Bomvana territory. The death of Ngqungqushe in the campaign led to King Faku being installed as King to succeed his father in this period.[3]

After the death of his father, Faku became the king[4]. However, there has been a different version of the story of how King Faku was installed on the throne. Some have credited the King’s ascendence to the throne to the fact that he was already a grown man commanding support from some of his father's subjects compared to his younger brother Phakani ka Ngqungqushe who was the rightful heir to the throne but was still very young and herding cattle when King Faku succeeded his father as the king of amaMpondo. Other narratives of the story reveal the support that King Faku's mother enjoyed from the advising council of King Ngqungqushe and the influence that Mamngcambe herself, King Faku’s mother had over the late King Ngqungqushe of the Mpondo kingdom while still alive played a major role in her son's ascendance to the throne[5]. However, the summarized version of the transfer of Mamngcambe to be the great wife was demonstrated by the performance of the stick ceremony that the two wives, Phakani’s mother and Mamgncambe had to perform respectively, a dance which includes putting the leopard skin on top of the stick which Phakani’s mother failed to master and was demoted to be the right-hand wife and relinquished her position to Mamngcambe as a great wife. 

In 1825 King Faku permitted the travelling of the British trader Henry Francis Fynn in his kingdom in search of elephant ivory and later allow the British trader to open a trading post inside the kingdom with some of his subject chiefs. Soon after settling in the Mpondoland region Henry Francis Fynn and other merchants developed an army that would later trouble the Mpondo King by capturing cattle for trade, hunting for ivory and possibly abducting people for the illegal slave trade to Brazil and America which was prohibited as early as 1807 through Slave Trade Act of 1807 [6].

In 1826 King Faku's elder son Ndamase led the Mpondo army against Shaka's regiments in their raid on the Mpondo kingdom around the Mzimvubu River in the battle of Mkhumbeni, which led to the death of more than 1500 warriors including Faku's uncle. However, the commanders ashamed of the defeat and the feedback to give to their King plundered cattle of the Thembu kingdom on their way back and took the cattle to present to King Shaka as if they had plundered it from Mpondoland[7]. However, with the king being aware of the long horns of the cattle from the Mpondo kingdom, King Shaka knew that his commanders were dishonest and had suffered a defeat at the hands of King Faku’s warriors. King Shaka knew that the cows presented to him by his commanders were not raided from the Mpondoland as the cows presented to him had short horns compared to the normal long-horned Mpondo cattle. The king in recognition of the strength of the Mpondo army sent 100 cattle to King Faku who in return exchanged the Zulu cattle with his, sending the same number of the Mpondo cattle to the Zulu kingdom and sealed an alliance with Shaka.  In return, the Zulu monarch awarded the Mpondo King up to the Northeast of King Faku's kingdom and the Thukela River[8].

In 1844 King Faku ka Ngqungqushe signed a treaty with the Cape Colony government which recognized his authority as the independent paramount chief over the areas of Mtata, Mzimkhulu and the Drakensberg mountains and the sea which were the areas in which his subjects settled. In 1840 King Faku moved his Great Palace from the Mngazi River, which was situated across a river called Mzimvubu back to where his father first established his royal palace at eQawukeni Great Palace near another smaller river compared to uMzimvubu which is called Mzintlava.[9]

In 1844, the Mpondo King entered an alliance with Sotho King Moshoeshoe to have the subjects of King Moshoeshoe occupy the land down the Drakensberg Mountains which initially belonged to the Mpondo people as part of the extension of King Faku's territory. In the agreement, King Faku made a declaration that there shall be no boundaries separating the two kingdoms, to have King Faku's land in the Drakensberg Mountains occupied and protected without having the king shift his people to settle at the foot of the mountain themselves. [10]

In 1845 the Mpondo King was fearful of the bitter civil wars caused by the kingship battles between brothers fighting for the throne, witnessed at the time of his reign by the kingship campaign between the half-brothers Mpande and Dingane. They were engaged in a disastrous civil war in the Zulu kingdom which led to a lot of bloodshed in the Zulu kingdom. When King Faku's elder right-hand son Ndamase ka Faku was in his mid-forties, King Faku allocated Ndamase land across the Mzimvubu River to rule over his subjects over the Western side of the Mpondo kingdom[11].

In Western Mpondoland, Ndamase became a ruler over his people while the young heir to the throne, Mqikela, would later inherit his father’s Eastern Mpondoland as the king.  Many generations after the death of the King until the present day the move marked the division of the Mpondoland kingdoms between the two royal palaces between eNyandeni Great Palace under Ndamase who established it as an independent kingdom and the Qawukeni Great Palace, under Mqikela and his descendants, making the previously united Mpondoland kingdom to be divided into two royal kingdoms. King Faku became the last King to rule one united Mpondoland kingdom.