Xhosa Tribe

South Africa's powerful Xhosa and Zulu nations sealed an important union as Nelson Mandela's great-grandnephew and King Goodwill Zwelithini's daughter wed. The marriage ceremony of Tembu Chief Nfundo Bovulengwe Mtirara and Princess Nandi Zulu completed its fourth and final day, as guests and neighbors presented gifts from cattle to DVD players.

Security forces in the black homeland of Ciskei repulsed an attack Thursday on the president's house by soldiers from a rival homeland who sought to take the leader hostage, Ciskei officials said. President Lennox Sebe and his family were not hurt, the officials said. Ciskei government spokesman Headman Somtunzi said guards killed one of the 25 attackers, wounded another and captured one of their leaders.

Scores of armed men attacked terrified passengers at a train station today, killing four people. Two more murders put the death toll at 149 from five days of factional fighting, police said. The country's worst urban violence in recent years spread to the giant Soweto township just outside Johannesburg when Zulu migrant workers battled supporters of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress with knives. Police said 99 people were injured today. One of the six dead had been burned alive.

African National Congress leader Nelson R. Mandela met Tuesday with chiefs from his tribe and with a Swedish diplomat, and plans were made for him to travel to Zimbabwe and Zambia next week. The National Reception Committee, which has coordinated Mandela's schedule since he was released Feb. 11 after 27 years in prison, said he will go to Harare, Zimbabwe, on Monday. On Tuesday, he will go to Lusaka, Zambia, where he will meet with exiled ANC leaders.

A black man with an AK-47 assault rifle opened fire Sunday on a group of blacks planning the burial of a man slain last month, killing 12 people and wounding 20. The shooting occurred near the site of a gruesome political massacre last month, but police and witnesses said the motive was unclear. Most violence between blacks has been linked to the rivalry between Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party.

Six Cabinet ministers in the South African black homeland of Transkei resigned Thursday because of an investigation into corruption that implicated the prime minister, Transkei officials said. For several hours, South Africa's state radio reported that Transkei's military had seized control of the nominally independent homeland and placed at least eight Cabinet ministers under house arrest. The South African Broadcasting Corp. later revised its report and said no coup had occurred.

In the windblown hills of the Eastern Cape, boys from the Xhosa tribe are in a hurry to be men. At 20, Siphelele Zweni was ridiculed in his village. They called him nofontyela , a non-man, who'd gone too long without his coming-of-age circumcision. But when it did take place, Zweni's circumcision and initiation was like a sadistic scene from "Lord of the Flies. " It cost him, literally, the very thing he yearned for: his manhood. "They taught me about being a man, but it was hell," says Zweni, defying a taboo about speaking out against the ritual, which in the Xhosa tribe traditionally had occurred when men were about 20. But early in the last century, the traditional ways were lost in some areas as local rulers stopped circumcisions.

Tribal fighting left at least 42 people dead in the Durban area and 6,000 to 7,000 others homeless when many residents torched their own homes and fled the battle scene, police said Friday. Durban police Capt. Winston Heunis said the devastated Umbumbulu shanty district, 20 miles southwest of Durban, was quiet Friday after two days of clashes between the Pondo tribe and the larger Zulu tribe. Heunis estimated that 2,000 shacks were destroyed.

Walter Sisulu, the South African political leader who spent more than 25 years in prison alongside Nelson Mandela and, with Mandela, helped shape the African National Congress' campaign against apartheid, died Monday. He was 90. In a statement, Sisulu's son, Max, said his father had died in his Soweto home, in the arms of his wife of 59 years, Albertina. A much-loved figure in South African politics, Sisulu, who would have turned 91 on May 18, was born in 1912, the year the ANC was founded.

When long-exiled South African filmmaker Jo Menell, producers Jonathan Demme and Chris Blackwell and co-director Angus Gibson joined forces to make the stirring Oscar-nominated documentary "Mandela," they decided to abide by a statement the South African president had made in regard to what was most difficult about life after 27 years in prison: "Getting people to see me as a human being, not as a messiah or a demigod."