Nongqawuse
Wikipedia and South African History Online both give Nongqawuse’s dates as about 1841 to 1898, with Wikipedia placing her birth near the Gxarha River and SAHO’s record giving Centani, though SAHO adds that the body text does not confirm either place or her death date. Both say she was an orphan whose parents died in the Waterkloof campaigns of the Eighth Frontier War (1850 to 1853) and that she was raised by her uncle Mhlakaza, a religious man who had lived in the Cape Colony, become familiar with Christianity and returned to Xhosaland in 1853.
The prophecy of 1856
According to Wikipedia, in April 1856 the 15-year-old Nongqawuse, with a younger friend, Nombanda, said that while scaring birds from her uncle’s crops near the mouth of the Gxarha she had met the spirits of two ancestors, who told the Xhosa to destroy their crops and kill their cattle and to abandon witchcraft, incest and adultery, in return for which the dead would rise and the settlers be swept into the sea. SAHO says she passed the message to Mhlakaza, who told royal officials; they visited the river and were eventually convinced, and that Mhlakaza organised and interpreted the messages, so there is no direct record of her own words. Wikipedia says he took the message to Chief Sarili.
The cattle-killing
Wikipedia says many herds were suffering from lung sickness at the time, that historians estimate the Gcaleka alone killed 300,000 to 400,000 head and that the movement spread across the Xhosa. A small minority, the amagogotya (“stingy ones”), refused to comply, and Nongqawuse used their refusal to explain why the prophecies failed over fifteen months. It says she predicted the dead would return on 18 February 1857 when the sun turned red; when that failed Sarili announced a new world within eight days, which also failed. It says the practices ended by early 1858, about 40,000 people had starved, more than 400,000 cattle had been killed and the population of British Kaffraria reportedly fell from 105,000 to under 27,000. SAHO says that when the promised renewal did not come, faith collapsed and the Xhosa were left vulnerable, so colonial authorities found it easier to impose subordination; it adds that Chief Ngubo confronted her and rejected her claims. See also Bomvana, whose chief Ntshunqe refused to take part, according to Wikipedia.
Arrest and later traces
Both sources say the Bomvana chief handed her to Major Gawler, with whom she stayed for a time, and that she was photographed with the Mpondo prophetess Nonkosi. SAHO says she was taken to Cape Town in October 1858 aboard the Alice Smith and held in the Paupers’ Lodge with Nonkosi, that her name is absent from the list of prisoners when the lodge broke up in August 1859, and that later traces of her are uncertain: a farm near Alexandria in 1905, a report that she was alive in 1910, a rumour of a grave on the Glenthorn farm. Wikipedia says she lived on a farm in the Alexandria district and died in 1898.
Who was she?
SAHO says historians disagree. Jeff Peires treats her as a child who had not reached puberty, a vessel for the ancestors, with Mhlakaza carrying the message to the chiefs; Helen Bradford reads her as an active agent, possibly a victim of incest and colonial violence, who condemned moral decay in her society; and in Xhosa oral tradition she is often cast as a villain or a foolish girl who betrayed the nation. The page says her true identity remains unknown. We take no side. This is a painful memory for many families, and the page does not add anything to what these sources say.
What we have not read
We have not read Peires’s The Dead Will Arise, Bradford’s articles, Ashforth (1991), Stapleton (1991) or Mostert’s Frontiers, which the sources cite, and we found no account from descendants of the people involved. We did not check the casualty figures; they are Wikipedia’s.
Izithakazelo
We found no recorded praise text or totem for Nongqawuse, so we are printing none.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia: Nongqawuse
- South African History Online: Nongqawuse (cites Peires 2003 and Bradford 1996, 2007, 2008)
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