by Peires, Jeff
They [the cattle] were reared by dirty hands that were handling witchcraft and other things such as incests and adulteries.10
One of these incests was the remarriage of widows, previously regarded as perfectly legitimate, but now forbidden by the prophetic group. However, by ‘incests and adulteries’, Gqoba is probably referring less to specific misdeeds than to sexual indiscretions generally – a category of behaviour, like witchcraft, so broad that few Xhosa could have denied its existence.11
Another cause of pollution was defeat in war, and it is easy to believe that the military disasters of the War of Mlanjeni (1850-3) not only filled the Xhosa with thoughts of loved ones recently dead but left them exposed to feelings of self-doubt and vulnerability, a state of mind associated with yet-to-be-cleansed impurity. Though there is no hard evidence of this, it is strongly suggested by the following evocative lines from the Xhosa poet and historian SEK Mqhayi (d. 1945), which explicitly link military defeat and consequent pollution to dreams of heavenly salvation:
But this land is defeated and captured.
All who live in it are become as prisoners.
Man is defiled and polluted.
It is now that the heavens fight and resound with war.12
Embracing as it did the admitted evils of sorcery, sexual misconduct and military defeat, the idea of witchcraft thus provided an interpretation of events which all Xhosa could accept and few contradict.
Existing cattle, being polluted by witchcraft, endangered the pure, undefiled cattle of the new people, which might ‘not mix with those of men’. This made it necessary for the Xhosa to dispose of their cattle before the resurrection took place, and there are indications that in the initial stages Nongqawuse and Mhlakaza attached more importance to getting rid of the tainted cattle than to the method adopted in doing so. There are several reports before September 1856 of believers selling their cattle. Magistrate Gawler wrote that the message of the prophet was ‘to get rid of their cattle either by slaughtering or by sale’. Bishop Gray, noting the low prices paid for Xhosa cattle, remarked that ‘when they cannot sell them they kill them’.13 This initial assumption of the believers, that the mere physical disposal of existing cattle would be sufficient to bring about the fulfilment of the prophecies, was modified as a result of the First Disappointment. From September 1856, cattle were sacrificed rather than disposed of at random.
Another implication of cattle killing is suggested by JJR Jolobe in his poem on Nongqawuse, where he refers to it as urumo. The idea of ukuruma is based on the Xhosa concept of reciprocity, that one must give something oneself when one is expecting some gift or privilege. Thus a Xhosa would ruma a rainmaker if he wanted rain, or the river people if he wanted to cross a river, or a homestead if he wanted to attend a sacrificial feast. By so doing, the giver established a claim to the benefits he anticipated, and it is in this sense that we should interpret the following phrase from the colonial records: ‘… in order that this [prophecy] may be carried into effect, they must prove themselves deserving by acting up to their commands’. The millennium was thus not initially meant for all Xhosa indiscriminately, but only for those who showed themselves worthy by paying their dues and thus gaining access to the community of believers and their share of the great feast to come.14
The mass killing of cattle stemmed directly from the lungsickness epidemic, but soon acquired wider symbolic significance. Mysterious and unpredictable, lungsickness was far beyond the power of the Xhosa stock owner to control, and overwhelmed his natural reluctance to slaughter by the near certainty that his cattle were going to die anyway. The concept of sacrifice naturally suggested by the killing of cattle clothed the act in symbolic significance and associated it with the usual religious practices observed during a time of divine affliction. In addition, the killing of cattle was a due, paid to the ‘new people’ in appreciation of their imminent arrival bearing a ‘happy state of things to all’. It is to the nature of these new people and the content of this ‘happy state’ that we now turn.
(b) Starting all over again
Although the lungsickness epidemic gave rise to the Cattle-Killing, it cannot explain all the features and beliefs of the movement. For the Cattle-Killing was not merely negative, not merely concerned with the elimination of pollution and diseased cattle. It also incorporated positive expectations. The most important of these, obviously, was ‘that the whole nation will rise from the dead’. This was not as abrupt a transition as one might think. For the Xhosa, as for many other African peoples, death was not a definite and conclusive departure from this earth. The dead lived on, though in a somewhat altered state. As one Xhosa expressed it in 1858, ‘Even though dead, he [the departed one] is still alive.’ Death does not sever all links ‘because, it is said, that although he has today become a Great One, those who remain are [still] his family’. William Philip, the son of Cattle-Killing believers, referred to burial as the ‘hiding’ rather than the disposal of the body. At the funeral of a chief, the mourners cried out:
Look upon us you who have gone to your vantage point.
Look upon the family of your house.15
The image of the vantage point (imiboniselo) is especially striking. It implies that the dead have gone off not to a different place but to an elevated position, in the world but not of it, where they can see but not be seen.
The presence of the dead constantly manifested itself in the lives of the living. They were responsible for good health and prosperity as well as for bringing misfortune upon the guilty. ‘Our daily life depends on him,’ said Chief Bhotomane, ‘even though he is no longer present.’ The dead occasionally communicated directly with the living through the medium of dreams. And if, as Harriet Ngubane has recently maintained, sleep is a kind of miniature death, then death, like sleep, might be regarded as a normal and transient state. The idea that the dead might rise (the Xhosa word for ‘rise’, vuka, being the usual term for ‘get up in the morning’) was thus not in itself a startling or surprising one. The following comment by William Philip clearly shows that the prophecies of Nongqawuse operated well within established and accepted Xhosa beliefs concerning the powers and capabilities of the ancestors:
The idea that a person does not die was an original belief of we black people. When, therefore, the girl spoke of the rising up, she was [merely] setting a spark to things that were already known concerning the ancestors.16
Although no Xhosa person then living had ever seen a mass rising of the dead on the scale envisaged by Nongqawuse, all were aware that the doctors whom they regularly consulted had experienced death and rebirth in the course of acquiring their special powers of communication with the invisible world.
It is remarkable that the word [thwasa] used to express this state of initiation [as a doctor] means ‘renewal’, and is the same that is used for the first appearance of the new moon, and for the putting forth of the grass and buds at the commencement of spring. By which it is evidently intended to intimate that the man’s heart is renewed, that he has become an entirely different person to what he was before, seeing with different eyes and hearing with different ears.17
There are enough important parallels between the process of thwasa and the Cattle-Killing movement to warrant us examining the former in more detail. After receiving his supernatural call, the initiate cut himself off from normal society. He refused to eat food cooked in the usual manner, cast aside his old garments, and lived off the pure and undefiled fruits of the field. He heard strange voices and seemed ‘to converse with invisible and unknown beings on some strange and incomprehensible subjects’. If this behaviour was accepted by established doctors as a genuine call from the ancestors then certain ceremonies, including cattle-killing, would be performed which would enable the candidate to re-enter normal life in his reborn state as a qualified doctor.
During the Cattle-Killing, the believers refused to eat their usual fo
od and they disposed of their personal ornaments. They sacrificed their cattle as a prelude to a future rebirth. Unfortunately, we do not know if the ordinary believer experienced mystical visions though Gqoba’s account of one group at the Mpongo river is highly suggestive.
[They] used to see abakweta [circumcision initiates] dancing on the surface of the water, and they thought they heard the thudding of the oxhide, accompanied by a song to which the abakweta danced. Truly, the people were so deluded that they went so far as to claim that they had seen the horns of cattle, heard the lowing of milk cows, the barking of dogs, and the songs of milkmen at milking-time.
Visitors to Nongqawuse’s place are reported to have ‘heard there at night, in the air, the old Xhosa heroes parading by in wild array’. It would be impossible to assert on the basis of limited evidence that the generality of believers experienced some kind of collective thwasa, but the turmoil, the frantic activity, and the suspension of usual routines and occupations must certainly have suggested a rite of passage from the old world to the new.18
In awaiting the rising of the dead, the Xhosa were clearly expecting the resurrection of their parents, grandparents, spouses and friends. Chief Mhala, for instance, ‘believed that he should be restored to youth and see the resurrection of his father and all his dead relations’. Nevertheless, it is curious that the colonial sources seldom use the well-established English equivalents of Xhosa words such as izinyanya (ancestors) or imishologu (spirits). They almost invariably refer to the expected deliverers as ‘the new people’, a term which does not correlate directly with any phrase in the surviving Xhosa-language texts. The operative term, however, no matter what the expression used, would certainly have been -tsha, a common Xhosa word translated in the standard Xhosa dictionary as ‘new, young, healthy’. This hypothesis is supported by Gqoba’s reference to the reborn ancestors appearing ‘selematsha’ (‘all new’) and by Chief Bhotomane’s narrative of the Cattle-Killing, in which he refers to new (‘ezintsha’) cattle and ‘new’ (‘ngokutsha’) food.19
The word ‘tsha’ is significant in that it associates the idea of newness with the idea of youth and health. The Xhosa linguist AC Jordan translates the phrase ‘selematsha’, which I have rendered ‘all new’, as ‘fresh and strong’, and his translation is equally valid.20 ‘New’ in Xhosa does not have its English connotation of novelty or originality, but rather implies freshness and rebirth. The Xhosa idea of newness is rooted in their perception of the cyclical recurrence of natural phenomena and, ultimately, the cyclical nature of time itself.
Without entering into so vast a topic as African concepts of time, I wish merely to observe that the following assessment by Benjamin Ray seems to apply to the Xhosa:
Instead of a linear unitary conception of time, there are a variety of ‘times’ associated with different kinds of natural phenomena and human activities. Time is episodic and discontinuous … There is no absolute ‘clock’ or single time scale.21
The Xhosa did have a conception of linear time, expressed through genealogies and the succession of iziganeko (significant happenings) which men used to date events in their personal lives. Nevetheless, the annual cycle of stellar constellations, associated as these were with the changing of the seasons and the pattern of agricultural production, accustomed the Xhosa to expect every year the return of the circumstances of previous years. The rites of passage concerning birth, maturation and death represented human life not as an irreversible aging process but as a repetitive cycle comparable to the repetitive cycles of seasonal and agricultural change. One example of this, already mentioned, was thwasa, the association perceived betweeen the rebirth of a person as a diviner and the re-emergence of the new moon and the spring buds. Similarly, chiefs were buried standing or sitting upright, surrounded by their spears, their pipes and all the other personal possessions they would require in their new life.22
Nongqawuse did not, however, confine herself to prophesying the rebirth of the past and the regeneration of the present. She promised nothing less than the re-enactment of the act of Creation itself as expressed in the concept of uHlanga, by which the Xhosa meant both the Creator god and the source of creation. King Sarhili informed his people that uHlanga had appeared at the Gxarha River. Fadana, the leader of the Thembu believers, was said to be a man favoured by uHlanga. The believers thought that the settlers and the Christian Xhosa would return to the uHlanga when the prophecies were fulfilled. Uhlanga was even confused on occasion with the biblical story of Creation, as when it was rumoured that ‘Adam our first father has come upon the earth accompanied by God and two sons of God, together with a numerous new people.’23
Uhlanga was believed to be the very place where God brought forth man and cattle upon the earth. It was pictured as a marsh (which appears to be solid but yet is not) overgrown with reeds which hid the entrance to a huge cavern in the centre of the earth from which the uHlanga sent forth all living things. Almost any river or deep pool potentially harboured an opening to the uHlanga. It was well known that spirits dimly connected with the ancestors and called ‘river people’ lived on the dry land which was to be found under the water in most rivers and pools.
The Xhosa did not regard the Creation as a one-off, never to be repeated event. According to Lichtenstein, who travelled in Xhosaland in 1805:
It is a current belief among them, that far to the north of their country, there is a vast subterraneous cavern, from which their horned cattle originally came, and that cows and oxen might still be procured from it in great abundance, if the entrance of the cavern could again be found, and a proper bait silently laid there. The cattle would then come forth, when they might be taken, and they would bring a blessing upon the possessor.24
Nxele, the prophet and wardoctor of 1818-9, claimed to originate in the uHlanga, and he predicted on one occasion that the Xhosa ‘would see all who had long been dead come forth alive from beneath the rock, and then all the people who possessed powers of witchcraft would be seized and placed in a cavern under the rock’.25
Nongqawuse’s followers believed that these long-promised expectations would be fulfilled.
The horns of oxen were said to be seen peeping from beneath the rushes which grew around a swampy pool near the village of the seer; and from a subterranean cave were heard the bellowing and knocking of the horns of cattle impatient to rise.26
The prophetess’s residence on the Gxarha River was thus invested with all the attributes of the long-lost cavern of the uHlanga.
Most of the subsidiary rituals of the movement were associated with the general theme of regeneration, and echoed existing Xhosa practices regarding birth and death. The new houses and new milk sacks ordered by Nongqawuse followed the custom whereby a dead man’s sons abandoned his old homestead and cut open his old milk sacks before starting afresh elsewhere in a new homestead with new milk sacks. The sale of old ornaments and the purchase of new ones followed customs relating to mourning and celebration. The buka roots, with which Nongqawuse bade the believers weave their new doors, were normally administered to young women to make them pregnant and prevent miscarriages.27 The new houses, new grain pits and new cattle enclosures, untainted by the sins and failures of the past, were a representation in miniature for each homestead of the bright new order about to be reborn on earth.
The ban on cultivation was naturally associated with the destruction of old food stocks and the expected dawning of a wholly new era. Blight and wet had devastated the Xhosa sorghum just as the lungsickness had devastated their cattle. Just as the new cattle might not mix with those of men, so too the new people ‘cannot eat the food of men’.28 Phatho’s men refused to cultivate that spring, but they bought new spades and hoes to till the ground in the new time coming. Cultivation had long been considered a human interference with the earth and the believers felt that it would ‘disturb’ the ground. Long before the Cattle-Killing, it was forbidden to cultivate th
e day after uHlanga had shown his displeasure by striking a homestead with lightning. When rainmakers asked uHlanga for rain, they forbade the people ‘to take either pick-axe or seed-bag, to dig or plant during the day; lest the lowering clouds should be thereby driven away’. Xhosa labouring on the roads during the Cattle-Killing abandoned their jobs lest the noise of their picks disturb the cattle and delay their appearance.29
There was little room in the Cattle-Killing movement for whites and other peoples who lacked a place in the Xhosa cosmology. The movement owed part of its momentum to hatred of the colonial intruders and the expectations raised by rumours of the Crimean War, but it is unlikely that the initial talk of whites swept into the sea was anything more than a convenient way of disposing of an anomalous element who had no place in the indigenous Xhosa scheme of things. However, after the First Disappointment, the believers seem to have reached the conclusion that they had erred in excluding the whites and the Christian Xhosa. Orders went out that the whites should also kill their cattle, and the believers initiated dialogues with the mission converts in an attempt to persuade them that Nongqawuse’s message was the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. The new offensive was short-lived and half-hearted and soon faded in the light of colonial antagonism and the need to find fresh scapegoats for continued failure. The whites, having killed the Son of God, were declared ineligible for salvation. Nevertheless the brief Christian offensive is significant inasmuch as it demonstrates that the main concern of the believers was not the expulsion of the settlers but the advent of a ‘happy state of things to all’.30
The millennium was to be absolute and total. The future was seen through a haze of white, the colour of purity.31 Not only were there to be new people, new cattle and eternal youth for all, there were to be no unfulfilled wants and desires of any kind. The new people would come ashore at designated places, mostly at the mouths of rivers. Their leader, according to Gqoba, was named Napakade, son of Sifubasibanzi. It was in the person of this figure that the strands of pre-Christian thought discussed in this section merged with the new teachings of the Christian missionaries.