Little is known about the life of Nongqawuse, yet she has become one of the most famous figures in the history of the Eastern Cape and the Xhosa people. She was probably born sometime in the early 1840s. In 1856 the adolescent Nongqawuse was living with her uncle, Mhlakaza, near the Gxarha River, which was just outside the border of colonial British Kaffraria. In April of that year she and a younger girl named Nombanda were sent to drive birds away from the maize fields when two strangers called to them from a nearby bush. The strangers told the girls that the entire Xhosa community would soon be reborn but that all cattle must be slaughtered, as they had been raised by people contaminated by witchcraft. Furthermore, people should prepare for this rebirth by the building new gain pits, cattle enclosures, and houses. However, when the girls went home to report what they had been told, no one believed them.
The next day they returned to the same spot, and once again the strangers appeared and told Nongqawuse to go directly to her uncle and tell him that they wanted to see him after he had purified himself by slaughtering a cow. Mhlakaza followed the instructions and four days later accompanied Nongqawuse to the field where he heard voices which repeated the earlier prophecies. Mhlakaza then reported this to Sarhili, ruler of the Gcaleka state and nominal king of the Xhosa, who was eventually convinced to issue a formal command that all the people should follow the orders that the strangers had given to Nongqawuse.
The message then spread to other Xhosa rulers, including those living in colonial territory. Ravaged by years of colonial aggression and a recent outbreak of a lung sickness among their cattle, many Xhosa people partially obeyed the prophecies by slaughtering or selling some cattle. When the date for the expected rebirth (the full moon of June 1856) passed without incident, Xhosa society became more polarized, as those who believed the prophecies blamed those who did not, and had not followed its dictates, for its apparent failure.
In January 1857 Nonkosi, a young girl who lived in British Kaffraria, reported seeing strange people who repeated the prophecies to her. This gave the cattlekilling movement renewed momentum within the colonial territory. Violence between believers and nonbelievers disrupted the planting season, and more cattle were slaughtered. Some chiefs supported the movement; others opposed it. Opportunistic colonial officials took advantage of this chaos to seize thousands of Xhosa to work on settler farms and to imprison Xhosa rulers, such as Maqoma of the Rharhabe, who had fought against colonial conquest.
By June 1857 mass starvation caused the cattlekilling movement to fade away. The cattle-killing controversy left as many as 50,000 Xhosa dead and upward of 150,000 displaced. As many as 400,000 cattle had been slaughtered. Within British Kaffraria, 60,000 acres were taken from the Xhosa and given to white settlers. In 1858, the colonial police invaded Sarhili’s weakened kingdom and drove him further east into Bomvanaland.
After the cattle-killing, Nongqawuse and Nonkosi were detained by the British, who forced them to dictate “statements” about their roles in this event. They were most likely released in 1859. For the rest of her life, Nongqawuse lived in obscurity; she died around 1898 near the Eastern Cape town of Alexandria.
There are many different opinions concerning the origins of this series of events. At the time, colonial officials justified their enslavement of the Xhosa and possession of their land by claiming that the chiefs, particularly Sarhili, had orchestrated the prophecies in the hopes their starving people would invade British territory. Today, Xhosa people believe a similar conspiracy theory, which maintains that colonial agents, perhaps Governor George Grey himself, hid in the bush and pretended to be Xhosa ancestors telling Nongqawuse the prophecies. The cattle-killing, therefore, is thought to be part of a colonial plot to destroy Xhosa resistance to colonial conquest. In some versions of this story, Nongqawuse is even portrayed as a colonial agent. It has become a common saying to describe a lie as a “Nongqawuse tale.”
There are many other interpretations of the cattlekilling. As early as the 1930s, Elizabeth Dowsley identified the relationship between lung sickness and cattlekilling. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was seen as either the result of missionaries teaching biblical miracle stories or as a “pagan reaction” to the increased colonization. Jeff Peires, an historian of the Xhosa people, explains it in terms of Christian influence specifically emanating from Mhlakaza, who had once been a convert at a mission station. However, Helen Bradford has demonstrated that there is absolutely no evidence for this claim. Her explanation is that the cattle-killing movement, in which women played a prominent role, arose because Xhosa men had engaged in mass child abuse and incest. However, there is no compelling evidence for this conclusion, either. Jack Lewis points out that too much emphasis has been placed on explaining the ideology of the prophecies, but not enough on the material reasons explaining why people heeded them. According to Lewis, some chiefs attempted to use the movement to centralize their authority in the face of increasing colonial power. Tim Stapleton argues that the movement was, at least in part, directed against the traditional aristocracy, whose power was based on cattle patronage, which had been discredited by continual defeat at the hands of the British and weakened by cattle disease. Powerless, many chiefs sanctioned cattle-killing because they had no other choice. Julian Cobbing has pointed out that it is possible that colonial officials, whose records provide the bulk of evidence for historians, exaggerated the millenarian nature of the movement to conceal their destruction of Xhosa society as an irrational national suicide.
Timothy J. Stapleton
See also: Hundred Years’ War, 1779-1878.
Biography
Born sometime in the early 1840s. In the mid-1850s she lived within the Gcaleka Xhosa state of King Sarhili, which was located just over the eastern border of British Kaffraria. She lived with her uncle Mhlakaza who was an advisor to Sarhili. In 1856 she reported
Being visited by long dead ancestors who promised a national rebirth of the Xhosa people if they slaughtered their cattle and refrained from planting their crops. After the cattle-killing she became an obscure figure and died around 1898 near the Eastern Cape town of Alexandria.
Further Reading
Bradford, H. “Women, Gender, and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and its Frontier Zones, 1806-1870.” Journal of African History. 37 (1996): 351-370.
Dowsley, E. D. A. “An Investigation of the Circumstances Relating to the Cattle-Killing Delusion in Kaffraria, 1856-1857.” Master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 1932.
Lewis, J. “Materialism and Idealism in the Historiography of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement 1856-1857.” South African Historical Journal. 25 (1991): 244-268.
Peires, J. B. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-1857. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989.
Stapleton, T. J. “Reluctant Slaughter: Rethinking Maqoma’s Role in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1853-1857).” International Journal of African Historical Studies. 24, no. 2 (1993): 345-369.
World History
