Episode 206 - Nongqawuse’s Bush of Ghosts, Mhlakaza’s Anglican Episode and Sarhili Goes to Gxarha

History of South Africa podcast

his is episode 206 - all fire and brimbstone, a horror show. The squeamish should gird their loins, prepare the poultices, polish your monocles and tighten your bootstraps, grab your smelling salts Roll up your sleeves and fetch the brandy, brace for impact.
It’s an episode that will begin a series of episodes which are clouded by a fine bloody mist, and a fog of confusion. We’re going to look at the amaXhosa Cattle Killings of 1856-57 and then the Zulu’s most bloody civil war clash, the Battle of Ndondukasuka.
One was a millenarian movement gone hopelessly wrong, the other was the old story of a young prince seizing power from the heir apparent.
Both epics are an exploration of human consciousness and both changed South African history.
Cetshway kaMpande of the amaZulu was amassing great power under the very nose of his dad, King Mpande.
Hold on, Before we head off to Zululand in forthcoming episodes, we’re going to peruse southern Transkei.
Alongside a magical river called the Gxarha. The little river is about 20 kilometers long, a tiny snakes’ tail, a meandering whispering essence, slithering through deep ravines and splashing in splended mini-waterfalls.
This is a case of dynamite in small packages because the river harboured dark secrets. It was to bare witness to a catastrophe.
The twists and turns of this saga are echoed in the twists and turns of the river, it’s a squiggle of a sprint for those tiny twenty kilometers. Cliffs and thick forest, more a jungle, make it impossible to walk along its bank for very far, and giant shadows are cast at dusk and dawn from the strelitzia and the reeds. A sand bar blocks its final sprint to the sea which bursts open in summer, a blend of bush, cliffs, forest and water.
It was a day in April 1856, the exact day is lost in time, when two youngsters, Nongqawuse who was an orphan of 15 and Nombanda, who was about 8 or maybe 10, left their homestead on the Gxarha river. Nongqawuse’s uncle, Mhlakaza, asked them to chase birds away from cultivated fields.
As they shooed the birds away in the early morning of that April day, Nongqawuse heard voices. She turned and standing inside a nearby bush were two men. They gave her a message which she was to relay to Mhlakaza when she and Nombanda returned.
“Tell that the whole community will rise from the dead, and that all cattle now living must be slaughtered for they have been reared by contaminated hands because there are people about who deal in witchcraft…”
The fusion of faiths and the belief in shades were intersecting in this youngsters’ mind. She had heard the stories about previous prophecies as she grew up, about Mlanjeni the Riverman and Nxele the wardoctor. The violence and upheavals of the Frontier Wars were paralleled by a huge spiritual upheaval which resulted in a clash of Xhosa and Christian religious ideas.
During the next thirteen months of this cattle killing between April 1856 and May 1857, about 85 per cent of all Xhosa adult men killed their cattle and destroyed their corn in obedience to Nongqawuse's prophecies.
It is estimated that 400,OOO cattle were slaughtered and 40,000 Xhosa died of starvation. At least another 40,000 left their homes in search of food. But it was to have another effect. After a dogged 80 years of resistance to colonial expansion, the amaXhosa struggle collapsed by their own actions - and almost all their remaining lands were given away to white settlers or black clients of the Cape government.