In search of Nongqawuse by Treive Nicholas (Kwela, 2025)
- Mphuthumi Ntabeni writes a regular book column for LitNet.
Title: In search of Nongqawuse
Author: Treive Nicholas
Publisher: Kwela (2025)
ISBN: 9780795711145
The strength of Treive Nicholas’s book is the manner in which it synthesises and makes accessible the argument about the complex forces that led to, or culminated in, the Great Cattle Killing of 1856-7. It has long been accepted now that explaining the incident as being merely influenced by Nongqawuse’s prophecies is too simplistic. Several forces, mostly consequential to colonial encroachment into Xhosaland, played a major role. Nicholas is not the first to examine all these forces and come to the conclusion that blaming Nongqawuse for this so-called millennial movement is unjustified.
We all know that in that area, the Xhosa were under tremendous stress, having lost one of the most brutal wars, the eighth Frontier War, known to them as the War of Mlanjeni. Consequential to that, the Xhosa had lost vast lands that had got confiscated by the British colonial government, meaning that several Xhosa tribes had to live packed in smaller spaces, without adequate grazing fields for their cattle. This made the Xhosas irascible and restless. The authority of their chiefs was being undermined by the colonial government to break up their traditional ruling structure. They had great hope in the prospect of the British losing the Crimean War, where one of the Xhosas’ nemeses, former Governor Cradock, had been killed. The Xhosa had superstitious beliefs that Cradock was killed by the resurrected Nxele, aka Makhanda, in Russia, and that the Russians were actually black people coming to save them after defeating the British. This resurrected their proverbial hope, ukuza kuka Nxele, the coming of Nxele they had been waiting for in vain for over three decades, to deliver them from British colonial oppression. Lastly, the Xhosas’ cattle were dying from a strange, highly contagious lung disease. The practice of culling animals affected by a strange contagious disease had been long practised among the Xhosa. In his book The dead will arise, Jeff Peires demonstrates how the graph of belief in Nongqawuse’s prophecies rose according to the wave of death brought by the spread of the lung disease, which had been brought by some cattle from Holland.
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Nicholas weaves all this together through an empathetic narrative that exonerates the young girl, Nongqawuse. She was obviously under the manipulative influence of powerful Xhosa men for their own ambitious reasons.
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Nicholas weaves all this together through an empathetic narrative that exonerates the young girl, Nongqawuse. She was obviously under the manipulative influence of powerful Xhosa men for their own ambitious reasons. Nicholas reminds us that had Nkosi Sarhili not been so keen to believe the prophecy, had his psychological make-up, emanating from the trauma of experiencing his father’s (Hintsa) brutal death by the hands of Harry Smith and co, he would have been less likely to believe the Nogqawuse prophecy. Sarhili and most Xhosa chiefs were desperate for a magical saving power against the British. They lurched on the prophecy with a desperation of a drowning men to a stick. Had Mhlakaza not been so opportunistic as to use his niece for his own ambition to rise in traditional power. Had Nxele’s promise of chasing white people to the sea, made of over 36 years before, not still held sway on the people living in the era of Nongqawuse; had powerful medicine men, like Mlanjeni, not invoked Nxele to bolster their own power; had the general Xhosa chiefs not sort to hijack the popularity of Mlanjeni because theirs had been fractured by the inability to deal with the overwhelming power of the British; had the cattle lung disease not happened at the same time to seal the fate of the Xhosa, things could have taken a completely different course. All these things weaved a tragic blanket of fate for the Xhosa.
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All these things weaved a tragic blanket of fate for the Xhosa.
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In the book, In search of Nongqawuse, Nicholas weighs all this and does not come up with much that is new. I would have loved to hear more about Nongqawuse’s life prior to and post the incident of the Great Cattle Killing. We need to know what actually happened to her after she was arrested and made to collaborate false testimonies of Smith, and rigged commissions, before working/settling at Ebumnyameni, Alexandria. The colonial powers abused and misused her, even incarcerating her on Robben Island, before the missionaries argued for her release. Getting into her mental state before and after the Great Killing incident would have been interesting, because she tragically lost her parents during the War of Mlanjeni, which is why she was looked after by his father’s brother, Mhlakazi. New scholarship places her in Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha before moving to the Glenshaw farm in Alexandria, where her grave is today. One would love to know the events leading up to her move, and whether it was purely socio-economical. Some Xhosa oral tradition even dispute that the grave on the farm is hers. Is it not time to test the veracity of the belief that the grave is hers? Do the farm owners, whom Nicholas spent time with, have documents testifying to this effect? Incidentally, I’m thinking and writing about this between the banks of the Bushman and Kariega Rivers, at Kenton-on-Sea. Alexandria is just a few kilometres from us. These questions play on my mind whenever I think about the tragic life of this woman as I pass Ebumnyameni.
Also missing, or taken lightly, in the book is the comprehensive treatment life of her uncle, Mhlakaza aka Wilhelm Goliath according to Peires’s book. Peires argues, successfully in my opinion, that Mhlakaza/Goliath used to be an assistant of Merriman, the bishop of the Anglican Church. He was once a witchdoctor himself, before becoming the first Xhosa man to be baptised into the Methodist Church:
In the settler city of Grahamstown, this man went by the name of Wilhelm Goliath, but his real name was Mhlakaza. We know that his father, who was a councillor of Sarhili, killed his mother in a fit of anger, but we do not know when or why. Wilhelm must have spent several years working in the Colony, for he spoke fluent Dutch and was a baptised member of the Methodist Church in Grahamstown, where several of his relatives also lived. He was married by Christian rites to an Mfengu woman named Sarah. In June 1849, he became the personal servant of Nathaniel James Merriman, the newly appointed Archdeacon of Grahamstown. It was a relationship which was to change Wilhelm’s life, and the whole course of South African history with it. Merriman was newly arrived from England with the task of supervising the Anglican Church throughout the eastern division of the Cape Colony. 1
Peires also claims that Mhlakaza died during the famine that was induced by the Great Cattle Killing. But a death notice of a certain Goliath, originally from Gcalekaland, has recently turned up in the archive at Robben Island. It turns out that he was incarcerated a few years after the Great Cattle Killing of 1856-7 and died many years after. This puts a spanner in the wheel of things. Not to comprehensibly attend to Mhlakaza’s life is a missed opportunity seeing that he had tremendous influence over his niece, Nogqawuse, and even controlled access to her during the controversial time of the prophecies.
Nicholas’s book also misses another opportunity by not paying attention to Mjuza, Nxele’s on living in the vicinity of Gxarha River when the prophecies were happening. Nogqawuse’s prophecies and Mlanjeni were greatly influenced by Nxele’s teachings, something Nicholas rightly concedes. No one can deny the fact that there is an apocalyptic pulse that entered the Xhosa national psyche through the mixture of clairvoyant and Christian teachings of Nxele. The presence of Mjuza in the Gxarha River area present an opportunity to examine that closer. For instance, why was Mjuza one of the fiercest opponents of Mhlakaza and the movement of the Believers? He was iGogotya, one of the Horders who refused to kill their cattle, and planted their fields. They were blamed for the ultimate failure of the prophecies, and they had to seek protection from the British colonial powers when the Believers sought to kill them. What informed Mjuza’s opposition if the millennial movement of Great Cattle Killings was influenced by his father’s teachings?
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In search of Nongqawuse is also a warm travelogue by someone (Nicholas) who has fond memories of having worked in the former Transkei. Not only is it a competent introduction to the tragic events of the Great Cattle Killing and the general history of that era, but it is a worthy companion for those who are in search of significant Xhosa cultural places.
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In search of Nongqawuse is also a warm travelogue by someone (Nicholas) who has fond memories of having worked in the former Transkei. Not only is it a competent introduction to the tragic events of the Great Cattle Killing and the general history of that era, but it is a worthy companion for those who are in search of significant Xhosa cultural places. Serious historians will probably be disappointed with the book’s lack of detail and new material, but they’re not its target market. The author makes it clear that he wanted to make the story accessible to the general public. He was surprised that he had never heard of the story while living and working in the Eastern Cape until he read the book Frontiers: The epic of South Africa’s creation and the tragedy of the Xhosa people by the late historian Noel Mostert.
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The Great Cattle Killing incident is an extremely sensitive issue among the Xhosa. Nicholas dared to tread where most fear to tread. He handled the topic fairly and with deep empathy. But much of what still needs to be researched and said about the incident remains.
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The Great Cattle Killing incident is an extremely sensitive issue among the Xhosa. Nicholas dared to tread where most fear to tread. He handled the topic fairly and with deep empathy. But much of what still needs to be researched and said about the incident remains. The opening up of the much neglected and earlier missionary history of the German Moravians is proving germane for this era of the Wars of Land Dispossession. It might correct the misconceptions from the obsession of our historians with the Anglo archive. Interesting enough, because they hardly had a dog on the land dispossession fight, the German missionaries seem more independent in their telling of the events, and closer in their understanding to Xhosa oral one. They find much fault in the shenanigans of Governor Grey who took the opportunity to make amaXhosa the indentured slaves of the British colonial economic. The current racial economic status of South Africa emanates from what became known as the Grey Policies of that era.
End note
1 Peires, Jeff. The dead will arise. Jonathan Ball Publishers (Pty), page 51.
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