The Dead will Arise

Nongqawuse and the great Xhosa cattle killing 1856-7

Jeff Peires

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781868425631
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Dead Will Arise tells the story of Nongqawuse, the young Xhosa girl whose prophecy of the resurrection of the dead lured an entire people to death by starvation. The Great Cattle-Killing of 1856-57, which she initiated, is one of the most extraordinary and misunderstood events in South Africa's history. Jeff Peires was the first historian to draw on all available sources, from oral tradition and obscure Xhosa texts to the private letters and secret reports of police informers and colonial officials, and the original edition of The Dead Will Arise won the 1989 Alan Paton Sunday Times award for non-fiction.

CHAPTER 1 – RIVERMAN’S WAR

CHAPTER 1

Riverman’s War

1. MLANJENI THE RIVERMAN

Mlanjeni, the Riverman, was about 18 years old in 1850, and so weak and emaciated from fasting that he could not walk about unaided.1 The power of evil so pervaded the world, he thought, that it inhabited even the homestead of his father Kala and poisoned even his mother’s cooking. In order to keep himself pure and undefiled, Mlanjeni withdrew from the society of men and spent much of his time alone. Most especially, he liked to go down to a deep pool on the Keiskamma River where he would sit up to his neck in water for hours – some said days – subsisting only on ants’ eggs, water-grass and other foods of nature. He greatly feared the debilitating power of women and kept himself strictly celibate.

At first his family had remonstrated with him concerning his strange behaviour, and his father told him that uncircumcised boys had no right to speak of such things as witchcraft and disease. But Mlanjeni persisted in his sayings even after he had passed through circumcision school, and this steadfast adherence to his singular manner of life eventually gained him the credence and respect of the Xhosa of the Ndlambe district of British Kaffraria. It was clear to all that the young man had been touched by contact with the spirit world, and the people therefore believed him when he intimated to them that he had been entrusted with a special mission for the reformation of mankind.

Mlanjeni’s teaching unfolded slowly and elliptically, revealing itself gradually in obscure and incomprehensible hints and metaphors. He reminded his visitors of Nxele, the giant prophet and wardoctor who had fired the Xhosa imagination some 30 years previously with his revelations concerning Mdalidephu the God of the black man, Thixo the God of the whites, and Thixo’s son Tayi, whom the whites had murdered.2 For this great crime, the whites had been thrown into the sea whence they had emerged to trouble the sinful Xhosa nation. ‘Leave off witchcraft! Leave off blood!’ Nxele had ordered the Xhosa. ‘These are the things that are killing our people. I am sent by the Great Chief of heaven and earth and all other things to say, lay aside these two evils, so that the world can be made right again.’ A great day was coming, a day on which the people who had passed away would rise again from the dead and the witches would be cast into damnation under the earth. Before the day arrived Nxele himself was dead, drowned escaping from Robben Island where the British had imprisoned him. But he had promised before he surrendered that he would come back one day, and many Xhosa were still awaiting his reappearance. They saw him repeatedly in dreams and visions and now he seemed to have returned to them in the form of this sickly youth.

Mlanjeni venerated the sun; he prayed to it and taught his followers to do likewise.

When we were there, he [Mlanjeni] sat turned towards the sun and prayed to it. He teaches that the sun is God, and when the sun’s rays break through the clouds that these are God’s twigs … At night God puts his cloak over us, this is the darkness. The stars are his dogs …3

Mlanjeni led the people to believe through vague insinuations and enigmatic utterances that some great event was about to reveal itself, though he did not say exactly what it was or how exactly it would occur. In order to bring this event to fruition, however, it was first necessary to rid the world of the ubuthi (evil substance) which was poisoning the earth all around. It was on account of this ubuthi that the great drought of 1850 was burning up the country, that the baking land refused the plough, that the cattle were like skeletons from lack of grass, and that the people themselves were suffering grievously from hunger. He, Mlanjeni, was divinely appointed to purify and cleanse and to destroy ubuthi, which was often secretly used by the Xhosa to help them find good fortune and to protect them from their enemies. ‘The land is full of ubuthi!’ cried Mlanjeni. ‘This is the cause of so much disease and death among both men and cattle; let all cast it away, and come to me to be cleansed.’4

Outside his father’s dwelling, Mlanjeni erected two witchcraft poles, standing as a gateway. People who wished to remove the suspicion of witchcraft walked between these poles. The innocent emerged unscathed but those who felt themselves guilty were overcome with weakness and fear as they approached. They stuck fast as if paralysed, while Mlanjeni shook and twitched and danced as well as he could. The large crowds who gathered at Kala’s place – for nothing like this had ever been seen in Xhosaland before – shouted, ‘He is fixed! He is fixed!’ and then, while the witch writhed on the spot quite unable to move, the people would shout, ‘Get out! Get out! Bolowane!’ to drive the witchcraft out of its victim.5 Eventually the witch, thus purged of his or her witchcraft, staggered through the poles to Mlanjeni who gave him a small twig of the plumbago bush to protect him and keep him pure of evil. For Mlanjeni gave orders that no person was to be harmed for being a witch, since witchcraft was not a personal quality but an evil affliction which he had the god-given power to cure.

Word spread throughout Xhosaland as far as the Great Place of King Sarhili beyond the borders of British Kaffraria that any Xhosa ‘having poisonous roots, all means of witchcraft, baboons [witchcraft familiars] or charms’ must immediately dispose of them. In those days there was constant whispering in the homesteads concerning particular individuals suspected of evil practices, and such persons were usually glad to visit Mlanjeni to clear themselves of dangerous rumours. Everywhere people burned their charms and medicines and threw the ashes into the rivers, to the delight of themselves and their neighbours. For everyone felt in danger of being bewitched by enemies, and thus even the most innocent maintained a private arsenal of protective devices. But now that Mlanjeni, through his extraordinary powers and his witchcraft poles, had identified and disarmed the witches, there was no longer any need for anyone to dabble secretly with bewitching medicines. Freed of tension, suspicion and malicious gossip for the first time in many years, the Xhosa relaxed in an atmosphere of peace and security, waiting for the next revelation from Mlanjeni.

Rumours of the Riverman’s power grew in the telling. ‘He lights his pipe on the sun,’ it was said; ‘he heals the sick, makes the blind see, the lame walk, and the dumb speak.’ When he danced, the drops of sweat falling from his body would cause the rain to fall.6 The further away the people lived, the greater the miracles they attributed to Mlanjeni, as this report from the Phuti in the foothills of the Drakensberg shows.

He commands the star of the morning to descend from the heavens to place itself on his forehead, and it obeys; he orders the earth to shake on its foundations, and the rocks and the mountains bow and tremble before him; he strikes the sun with his enchanted spear, and he becomes in turn a hare, a hyena or any other beast he desires; he sows the seeds of corn with his hands, he conjures them to germinate and grow in an instant, and these seeds germinate thus, shooting out green stems and developing before one’s eyes.7

The sun itself, his followers said, descended from heaven to touch Mlanjeni’s head and passed through his body to his feet from which it arose again to appear with new brilliance in the east. And everywhere the believers saluted its rising by shouting ‘He appears! He appears! Mlanjeni! Our chief!’ Children exclaimed that Mlanjeni was the ‘True Lord’ while their parents remarked that the black man was rich by comparison with the white for, by contrast with the dead God of the missionaries, the black man’s god still lived and visibly manifested his power by miracles every day.

The greatest miracle was still to come. For since the Xhosa believed that all evil, sickness and death was caused by witchcraft, and since they also believed that Mlanjeni was endowed with the power to eradicate all witchcrafts whatsoever, they therefore believed that the Riverman was possessed of the ‘secret of Eternity’ and could conquer death itself.8

1 For Mlanjeni, see especially ‘Nzulu Lwazi’ (SEK Mqhayi), ‘URev Tiyo Soga, uTshaka noMlanjeni’, Umteteli waBantu, 17 Dec. 1927; letter from Bryce Ross, 19 Dec. 1851, Home and Foreign Record of the Free Church of Scotland, 11(1851-2), pp.267-8; A Kropf (1891), pp.6-7; Imperial Blue Book 1334 of 1851, G Mackinnon-H Smith, 30 Sept. 1850 and enclosures, pp.15-19; Grahamstown Journal, 21 July 1855.

2 On Nxele, see Peires (1981), Ch. V and, especially, South African Library, Cape Town, Grey Collection, MS 172c, ‘Kaffir legends and history’ by WK Kaye. For examples of sightings of Nxele after his death, see Grahamstown Journal, 4 Aug. 1842, Cape Frontier Times, 5 Jan. 1843.

3 Berlin Missionberichte, May 1851, p.81. Mlanjeni’s emphasis on the sun is without precedent in Xhosa religion and was not taken up in subsequent Xhosa religious movements. It might support the contention of Bryce Ross (see Note 1 above) that Mlanjeni learned some of his ideas as a boy from emancipated slaves. On the other hand, it is possible that Mlanjeni’s emphasis on the sun is a consequence of the felt need of the Xhosa of this time to have a ‘high God’ of their own. Cf. R Horton (1967).

4 Bryce Ross, p.267.

5 Quoted from ’Nzulu Lwazi’. The term Bolowane’ presents some problems. I initially thought that it referred to the sacred herd of cattle among the Bomvana called ‘Bolowane’ cattle. But it seems (PAW Cook (n.d.), p.122) that this herd only became sacred after the Bomvana (who were nominally subject to King Sarhili) refused to sacrifice them at Mlanjeni’s orders. JH Soga identifies ‘Bolowane’ as another name for the mimosa tree (quoted in GD Ross, ‘Sacrificial cattle’, typescript, ‘Butterworth, 10 Nov. 1924, copy in author’s possession). It would seem therefore that the exclamation ‘Bolowane!’ is in some way connected with Mlanjeni’s witchcraft poles, although the mimosa has no magical associations as far as I can ascertain.

6 Interview with W Dwaba, Tshabo Location, Berlin District, Aug. 1975.

7 These reports of distant rumours concerning Mlanjeni come from the detailed letters of the French missionaries....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes on Terminology and Pronunciation
• Dramatis Personae
• Poem
• CHAPTER 1 – RIVERMAN’S WAR
• CHAPTER 2 – Crooked like a Snake
• CHAPTER 3 – Nongqawuse
• CHAPTER 4 – ‘There is a Thing which Speaks in my Country’
• CHAPTER 5 – To the Bitter End
• CHAPTER 6 – The Apotheosis of Major Gawler
• CHAPTER 7 – The Chiefs’ Plot
• CHAPTER 8 – Kaffir Relief
• CHAPTER 9 – Under Our Thumb
• CHAPTER 10 – Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Xhosa Cattle-Killing
• CHAPTER 11 – And Last
• Afterword (2003)
• Maps
• Picture Section
• Select Bibliography
• Copyright Page