In search of Nongqawuse: unraveling the tragic legacy of a young Xhosa prophetess

A story of a young orphan girl and a catastrophic historic calamity…

At the centre of this disturbing, ruinous tale is a young orphan girl whose intriguing spiritual prophecy “captures” her community, tortured as they were, and ends in the horrific and painful mass starvation and death of thousands in her community, tragically nearly destroying them as a nation. 

The young prophetess, Nongqawuse, from the Gcaleka clan, does not die in this event. She is doomed to watch the killing of about 400,000 of her community’s cattle she had called for as a sacrifice to the ancestors to save them against the colonists. She is then fated to witness the horrific and painful subsequent starvation of 40,000 of her people.

Once this humanitarian fatality is over, Nongqawuse is rewarded by the harsh voice of history as the most disastrous calamity ever to have befallen her people. She is labelled the cause of their near annihilation and for centuries has been described as the evil reason behind their brokenness as a nation. 

What started out as a prophecy intended to save her people against the colonialist horror they faced turns into a self-induced horror for the once proud and mighty amaXhosa in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The profound impact of the event caused a cataclysmic shift in the trajectory of the history of South Africa, its consequences still visible and reverberating to this day. 

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Author Treive Nicholas describes himself as a traveller “who likes to retell stories”. In reading his book, this reviewer was moved from listening to his story to becoming a fellow traveller who saw this sad historic event in an entirely new light as he tackles the brave journey through Nongqawuse’s life and times.  

Nicholas wanders through the horrific cattle-killing events of 1856 to 1857 in the beautiful Eastern Cape with mesmerising inquisitiveness. He paints the intriguing world of the indigenous amaXhosa, a proud, spiritual people haunted and hunted by the crusading colonialists who had beset their land out of greed, misplaced notions of superiority and egotistical lust for utter, despicable destruction and cruelty.

He brings to life the fascinating key leaders of the amaXhosa, the amazing indigenous traditions, spirituality and connection to nature that governed their existence. He dwells on the historic contexts of the times, the colonial expansion, the brutality and inescapability of it, the decades of nine frontier wars fought by the Empire and the indescribable barbaric torture and killing of the amaXhosa leaders. 

Through this writer, readers travel to the beautiful spot where Nongqawuse met the ancestors who gave her the prophecy, to her grave on a farm where she worked as a domestic worker for the rest of her life. We meet extraordinary characters (some descendants of the very same colonialists) who know her story and care for her grave. We visit the tragic place where King Hintsa, the paramount king of the Xhosa people, was murdered so brutally by Sir Harry Smith and his men and to his grave where he rests as a symbol of Xhosa resistance and bravery. 

The book stirs in one profound questions about the meaning of girls and women in male-dominated societies, of the meaning of the loss of spiritually centred communities, of how humans make culprits and scapegoats of some, of the horrific pain some poor souls like Nongqawuse must bear in this life, of the beauty of the Eastern Cape and the importance of its history and the criticality of knowing this history.

It’s an old story from the 1700s, but it feels almost familiar. It speaks of the danger of desperate people doing desperate things in an attempt to survive. It speaks of revolutions gone wrong.

I am still reeling from the facts about Harry Smith, hailed as an eternal hero in the UK, with his hands and body and head and hair soaked in the blood of thousands and thousands of people in Africa and India. 

What is it that we humans can make such heroes of people who prove in time to have been absolutely evil? The lesson is to fight the blindness infecting human groups who will tolerate the death and mutilation of people in huge numbers based on whatever reason they have convinced themselves of at the time.   

In Search of Nongqawuse is a gem. Nicholas is affected and changed by his pilgrimage, and in turn, changes the reader. He speaks with deep respect and does not allow ego, academic superiority or politics to bedevil his story. He is a traveller who fell in love with a story about a young orphan prophetess and tries to walk in her shoes, in her time and in her pain. 

I am richer for having read this book. The world is richer for Nicholas to have written it in the way he did. 

Which is why, in time, as I drive the beautiful Garden Route on holiday to the Eastern Cape, I might just turn onto a gravel route to seek out the sites he writes about. I will never stop wondering about Nongqawuse and the spirit of this orphaned amaXhosa girl and the profound existential questions her life gave birth to. DM

In search of Nongqawuse by Treive Nicholas is published by Kwela.