Nongoloza: king of the Ninevites​

​​​From doing odd jobs in KwaZulu-Natal to the most powerful king of the South African underworld, the name Nongoloza conjures images of both noble rebellion and vicious crime.
It all started with a horse back in 1886 – a horse that went missing and had to be found or paid for by somebody. That somebody was Nongoloza, and he felt he was being treated badly, so badly that he moved from KwaZulu-Natal to Johannesburg, where he started his career as a crime king.

“On informing my master of this [the missing horse] he accused me of being negligent and blamed me for it and told me to go and look for it,” recounted Nongoloza in a statement many years later. “I told him that as I was working in the garden on that day he could not hold me responsible for the loss, as all the horses were out grazing alone.”

Nongoloza described how his “master” threatened to put him jail if he didn’t go and look for the horse, so he went and looked but did not find the horse.

“He [Tom J] then told me to go back to my kraal and work for Mr Tom P again, and added that Tom P would then bring to him the value of the horse that was lost. This amount would represent my wages for about two years.”

It was this act that set Nongoloza on a very different path from the one he might have taken as “houseboy” or horse groom or gardener, jobs he was doing when the horse went astray.

Nongoloza, a powerful personality, became more famous and enduring than he would ever have imagined, and his legacy lives on more than 140 years later, particularly in the prisons of the Western Cape. He resisted becoming part of the labour-repressive institutions of a rapidly industrialising Johannesburg, like mine compounds, pass laws and prisons, that greeted blacks who were pushed off the land and forced to sell their labour in the towns.

Nongoloza, or Mzuzephi Mathebula, was born in Zululand in 1867 into a family of three boys and two girls. His name, Mzuzephi, means “Where did you find him?” records Charles van Onselen in The small matter of a horse – the life of ‘Nongoloza’ Mathebula, 1867-1948.

His father soon moved the family to live on a farm near Bergville in KwaZulu-Natal, close to where the Tugela River flows out of the Drakensberg mountains. He grew up herding his father’s cattle and living a solitary existence, not being close to his siblings or his father, who was often away from home.

At the age of 16 he got a job as a gardener in Harrismith, some 50 kilometres to the north. He also trained and worked as a groom in the Free State town, receiving a gift of a horse in “part payment for his conscientious labour”.

In 1886, at the age of 19, Mzuzephi went to work for Tom J again, not as a gardener as he had done previously but now principally as a groom. It’s at this point that the horse went astray, and Mzuzephi was sent to find it.

He went back to work for Tom P, as he was told to do, and was sent to Johannesburg, transporting sugar and flour to the town and returning with empty wagons. He was obviously mulling over his situation – on his return he approached his brother, asking his advice.

“On returning I asked my brother whether it was the law, and whether he thought it fair that I should work and have my wages kept back to pay for the horse which I did not lose,” he wrote in his statement. “He told me that I must work or they would put me in gaol and added that he did not want to see me there.”

Mzuzephi’s deep sense of injustice at his punishment is evident. “I told him that I would not work to pay for what I did not lose and that when I was sent to Johannesburg again I would remain there.”

This he duly did, finding work in Jeppe as a “houseboy”. He sent home money to his mother with men who lived near his homestead. One of his brothers turned up in Joburg and pressured him to return home to resolve the problem as the family was still dependent on the goodwill of Tom P, on whose farm they lived in return for giving him their labour.

Mzuzephi was reluctant to do this, and resolved to do the only thing open to him under the circumstances: cut all ties with his family.

He dropped his job and took on a new name: Jan Note. The name appears to be a combination of Afrikaans and English words, but, says Van Onselen, “unotha” refers to “native hemp, cannabis, satwa of the best quality”, a reference to a dependency that Mzuzephi had developed as a young herdboy.​

With his new identity he took a job as a groom with “four gentlemen” in a remote house in Turffontein. He was paid very well – 30 shillings a week – on condition he was honest and did not invite any friends on to the property.

Then Note discovered something unusual about his employers. “Purely by chance, Note had taken up employment with one of the many gangs of highway robbers which thrived amidst the unsettled conditions which accompanied the birth of Johannesburg,” says Van Onselen.

Within a few months Note was invited to come along on one of the trips. “We had ridden as far as Jukschy River where we dismounted, and I was told to look after the horses,” he records. “A coach was coming towards us, and the men pretended to be busy examining their horses’ feet until the coach came up to us. The men then held up the driver of the coach with revolvers and some of them mounted the coach and threw all the boxes and trunks belonging to the passengers into the road. These were broken open and searched and all valuables and money taken by the four men.”

It didn’t take the wily Note long to figure out that this was an easy means of making a living. “Until this time I did not know what robbery was and I was surprised to learn how easy it was to get money by this means.”

It wasn’t long before he made a crucial decision. “Learning from my experiences with these four men how easy it was to get money by means of robbery, I decided to start of band of robbers on my own, which I eventually did.”

In early 1890 he made contact with two men in the black underworld, and set up a base in the rocky overhangs of the Klipriversberg hills 10 kilometres south of the town.

Within a year or two a small community of about 200 men and women vagrants and petty thieves had established themselves in the hills.

And then the leader of this group, Nohlopa, was caught and spent some time in jail, where he learned to read and write, spending his time studying the bible. When he returned he said he was going to drop out and preach the word of God. This decision gave Note the opportunity to take control of the gang of thieves, finally revealing his true genius.

​He reshaped the motley band of robbers into a miniature army, what Van Onselen refers to in New Nineveh as the “Witwatersrand’s lumpenproletarian army”, appointing himself as Inkoos Nkulu or king. “Then I had an Induna Inkulu, styled lord and corresponding to the governor-general. Then I had another lord who was looked upon as father of us all and styled Nonsala.

Then I had my government who were known by numbers, number one to number four. I also had my fighting general on the model of the boer vecht generaal. The administration of justice was confided to a judge for serious causes and a landdrost for petty cases. The medical side was entrusted to a chief doctor or inyanga.”

He also appointed colonels, captains, sergeant-majors and sergeants in charge. “This reorganisation took place in the hills of Johannesburg several years before the 1899 war was dreamed of.”

Note then decided on a name for “my gang of robbers”. He wrote: “I read in the Bible about the great state Nineveh which rebelled against the Lord and I selected that name for my gang as rebels against the government’s law.” They were called the Ninevites or Umkosi Wezintaba – the Regiment of the Hills.

And so, says Van Onselen, the Ninevites emerged as a “tightly structured organisation” with a “certain amount of ideological cohesion and social purpose”.

Then Note made another move to consolidate his empire. He banished the women living in the hills, attributing venereal diseases among his men to them. His inyangas were unable to clear his men of the diseases so this seemed the next obvious step. The older men were to take the younger men as “boy-wives”, he decreed.

Van Onselen records that to some extent the Ninevites were involved in “social justice”, redressing any injustices that fellow black workers experienced at the hands of their white employers.

Nongoloza probably stayed in one of these cells in No 4, the native section of The Fort.

In April 1900, Note was sentenced to seven years with hard labour and 30 lashes on attempted murder charges. He was sent to Pretoria, where “for the better part of the next seven years, he and his followers entered into an open confrontation with the brutal system of prison administration presided over by Lord Milner and his reconstruction government”, according to Van Onselen.

But through it all Note maintained control of the Ninevites and their activities inside and outside of prison. Ironically, this was aided by the Milner government’s extension of the pass system, which meant that men moved in and out of the prisons on pass offences, neatly aiding his communication with the outside world. And secondly, because the government did not separate hardened criminals like himself and his followers, from first-time offenders, he had no trouble demonstrating his control “over an organisation which now reached out to embrace prison, mine compound and black township alike”.

In fact, in some ways his status only grew, and while inmates readily made sacrifices of food, tobacco or dagga to him, the entire prison would often echo to calls of “Bayede”, a greeting reserved for Zulu royalty.

Between 1900 and 1904 there was a concerted effort to break Nongoloza by means of putting him in chains, up to 25 lashes at a time, hard labour, transfers between Pretoria and The Fort, further sentences and hard labour as a result of attempted and successful prison escapes. He tried to communicate his grievances with the system to the authorities, however, the discipline he imposed on his army was equally harsh.

Suspected infiltrators were severely punished: beatings on the chest with clenched fists; eating large quantities of porridge and then being subjected to blows in the stomach; thrown up into the air in a blanket then allowed to drop on to the concrete floor; and having the front teeth removed by forcible extraction, a blow from a wooden spoon, or being cut out with a penknife.

These teeth were then added to a necklace of teeth that it’s believed Nongoloza wore, Van Onselen records.

Meanwhile, crime in the burgeoning town escalated. New recruits to the mines, replacing the Chinese labourers returning to their homeland, were soon introduced to Nongoloza’s Ninevites. The recession of 1906 to 1908 just added to the gang’s pool of recruits, which by now stretched from Benoni in the East Rand to Potchefstroom, some 400 kilometres southwest of Joburg, in North West province.

It was estimated that by 1912 Nongoloza’s “expanding criminal army” had close to “1 000 Zulu, Shangaan, Swazi, Xhosa and Basuto adherents”.