by Peires, Jeff
Fadana did not attend the meeting, nor was he ready to ask anyone for mercy or forgiveness. ‘I will not die like a dog from starvation,’ he declared, ‘but will take cattle from whomever I can.’5 The pace of the Cattle-Killing actually accelerated in parts of Thembuland as lungsickness spread. One former unbeliever, suddenly seized by a conviction of the truth of the prophecies, caught his calves and slit their throats, then drove his 50 cattle into their kraal and stabbed them all in a single frenzy.6 Fadana’s men travelled the country in armed bands, attacking unbelieving Thembu who were trying to get their cattle out of the danger zone. They killed a poor Mfengu woman for trying to stop her husband killing his cattle. They plundered the cornpits of unbelievers ‘for the children of Fadana’ but they refused to eat the new maize just harvested.7
Even before the final extinction of all hope after June, Fadana was attacking unbelieving chiefs, wealthy commoners and Thembu police in a style more appropriate to a warrior chief than to a simple robber or a starving thief. He invited the Xhosa believers to join him, and even though Sarhili reluctantly declined, his close associate Bhotomane participated in the raids. In the midst of starvation and death, Fadana’s followers briefly relived the heady feasting and celebration of the height of the Cattle-Killing. They slaughtered every beast they stole as soon as they got it home, and huge hunks of meat lay about their dwellings, some recently killed and some putrefying uneaten. Heads and hides of slaughtered cattle carelessly littered the courtyards and, in Fadana’s own place, burnt cattle bones lay in heaps 12 metres round and 1 metre high.8 Success bred success, and Fadana’s fighting strength snowballed at the rate of 50 or so believers a week. At first they consciously restricted themselves to the cattle of fellow Thembu, but by the middle of July they had gained sufficient confidence to attack the convoys supplying provisions to the colonial troops and even to challenge patrols of the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police. As Fadana’s power soared, the morale of the unbelievers collapsed, for what, they said, was the use of fighting one so blessed by the uHlanga? In early August, Fadana attacked Darhala, the collaborating son of his ally Qwesha, and got off with 200 cattle.9
By this time, it was clear to the colonial authorities that they had a genuine military threat on their hands: not a make-believe crisis brought about by an imaginary chiefs’ plot, but a real crisis brought about by their refusal to send troops to support the unbelievers in the heart of the threatened areas. The Thembu unbelievers had been asking for military assistance ever since December 1856, just as the Xhosa unbelievers had done, and their pleas, like those of the Xhosa unbelievers, had been ignored. As late as July 1857, the colonial administration was trying to shuffle off its responsibility, refusing to commit white soldiers to the help of black unbelievers. Warner, the agent in charge of the ‘Tambookie Location’, strongly urged the government to abandon its scruples.
If we are to be shackled and hampered by the quibbles of colonial law in managing a barbarous people like these … then all hope of restoring the country to a state of tranquility and security is at end … If Colonial law is an insuperable obstacle, then declare martial law.10
The scruples restraining the colonial government were probably more political and financial than moral – they had to sell the Fadana campaign to the Cape Parliament, which paid for the Frontier Armed and Mounted Police – but there was a very real sense in which the commando eventually sent against Fadana breached a moral barrier when they crossed into the ‘Tambookie Location’. They left behind them, as it were, a world in which behaviour was ordered by rules and regulations, and entered a new universe where norms and ethical standards no longer applied.
Commandant Walter Currie – ‘half measures are no use, and leniency not understood by savages’ – mustered a force of about 1 500 men against Fadana’s 300 or 400 believers.11 The ‘friendly’ unbelievers were evacuated in advance ‘to prevent accidents’, and they even agreed to burning the homesteads of their own people so that the expedition might ‘have a clear field to work in’. Moving slowly over difficult terrain in wet weather, the patrol arrived at Fadana’s place to find the chief and the main body of his followers gone. They found a number of women and children in the last stages of death by starvation, ‘children often being unable to walk from the attenuation of the limbs’. Dogs were seen, half-starved, eating the corpses of other dogs. A few men were hiding in inaccessible rocks and caves from where some of the followers of the Thembu chief Maneli dragged and butchered them. ‘We hunted this tribe … for three days,’ reported Currie. ‘Hunt’ seems to have been a most appropriate word for what was happening. Fadana himself managed to get away to Sarhili’s country, but the Xhosa King, under pressure himself, was persuaded by the missionary Waters to ask him to leave.
Meanwhile Currie’s men rounded up Chief Qwesha and burned out all suspected believers and all Gcaleka – termed ‘squatters’ – resident in the ‘Tambookie Location’.12 There was no resistance. Finally, Inspector Griffiths tracked Fadana to a hut in Chief Fubu’s country, and threatened to burn all its occupants alive unless they surrendered. Fadana was marched on foot back to Queenstown with a noose around his neck, arriving so lame and injured that he had to be carried further in a waggon. When they eventually stood trial, fortunately for them under colonial law, Fadana got seven years and Qwesha one. Currie got a knighthood.13
The Fadana patrol was, perhaps, nothing more than a minor incident on the periphery of the Cattle-Killing. Its historical significance lies less in what it did than in what it foreshadowed. A mixed colonial force had crossed the frontier and attacked a group of believers outside colonial territory. At least 50 unresisting and starving people had been shot and killed, many in a callous fashion. The rest of the people, equally unresisting, had been cleared out of their lands and Currie was suggesting that 144 square miles of the ‘Tambookie Location’ – mostly the land of the friendly unbelievers – be given out to white settlers. And that was not all. The easy pickings in the Thembu location had given the bold commandant further ideas:
The only thing that is worth staying here for now is to pitch into Krelie [Sarhili], which I think I could undertake without putting the Government to any expense. Krelie avoids us on all occasions and will not come into action, although twice I fired upon his people whilst passing through his country finding them mixed up with Fadana’s …
Now I hope if the Governor finds fault with me for going too far, you must soften it down, but I agree with you that silence gives consent, and now that all is over as far as regards the Tambookies, why it does not much matter, but I am itching to go in at Krelie. We never had the [Xhosa] as a nation under our Thumb before, and it is our policy to keep them there.14
1 CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 24 Feb. 1857.
2 CO 2951 J Warner-R Southey, 5 Oct. 1857; GH 28/72 J Warner-G Grey, 17 Nov. 1857.
3 Diary of RJ Mullins, Cory Library, 25 May 1857.
4 CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 24 Feb. 1857.
5 BK 71 C Brownlee-J Maclean, 24 Aug. 1857.
6 GH 8/32 Anon-J Maclean, 27 May 1857; CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 28 April 1857.
7 CO 2949 J Warner-R Southey, 28 April, 2, 9 June 1857; CO 2949 Deposition of Jonas, 11 May 1857.
8 LG 410 J Warner-R Southey, 14 July 1857; LG 152 W Currie-R Southey, 28 Aug. 1857; CO 1950 C Griffith-W Currie, 25 July 1857.
9 LG 410 J Warner-R Southey, 14 July 1857; CO 2950 J Warner-R Southey, 4, 6 Aug. 1857; CO 2950 J Warner-WGB Shepstone, 21 July 1857; CO 2950 WGB Shepstone-R Southey, 25 July 1857.
10 CO 2935 J Warner-R Southey, 23 Dec. 1856; CO 2950 R Southey-R Rawson, 1 Sept. 1856; CO 2950 J Warner-R Southey, 29 July 1856.
11 For some of Currie’s arrangements, see CO 2951 J Warner-R Southey, 5 Oct. 1857. For Currie’s own account, LG 152 W Currie-R Southey, 28 Aug. 1857. For an account by one of the v
olunteers, see Cape Argus, 19 Sept. 1857.
12 GH 20/2/1 H Waters-J Maclean, 5 Sept. 1857; GH 28/72 Government Notice 341, quoting W Currie-R Southey, 23 Sept. 1857. The term ‘squatter’ was used, of course, to imply that the Gcaleka in question had no right to be north of the Indwe in the ‘Tambookie Location’. But the Gcaleka in question had always lived in this area, and were willy-nilly incorporated in it when the colonial government chose to accept the Thembu definition of the boundary.
13 GH 23/27 G Grey-H Labouchere 30 Nov. 1857; King William’s Town Gazette, 26 Sept. 1857; Cape Argus, 5 Dec. 1857.
14 LG 152 W Currie-R Southey, 28 Aug. 1857; W Currie-R Southey, 23 Sept. 1857, quoted in Rutherford (1961), p.385. Note that the independent account in the Cape Argus gives a figure of 80 killed when the commando had still a month to run.
2. EATING THORNS
In the eight days preceding the Great Disappointment of 16-17 February 1857, popular support for the Cattle-Killing movement reached its height. That terrible failure split the believers into two factions. The less committed, those who had slaughtered some of their cattle but hidden the rest, now abandoned the prophecies and were only too glad to beg milk and pumpkins from their former enemies, the unbelievers.1 But the hard core of believers, those who had ruined themselves beyond any possibility of recovery, continued to hope for the fulfilment of the prophecies on which they had staked their all. They heeded the confused excuses from the Gxarha and Mpongo rivers, and refused to seek work or eat new corn.2 Chief among these inveterate believers was King Sarhili himself.
We last saw Sarhili just after the Great Disappointment, which left him ‘very much disconcerted and does not know what to do with himself’. His feelings of guilt were not long sustained, however, and within a very short time he was once again blaming the unbelievers for the catastrophe and blocking their attempts to escape with their cattle. Nongqawuse had begun to speak again, and now she was joined by a new prophet named Tsimbi, who lived near Sarhili’s capital of Hohita. Tsimbi told Sarhili that the new people, though disappointed by his failure to carry out Nongqawuse’s orders, were merciful. More, they were poised to rise again from under the ground below the King’s own Great Place (9 April 1857).3 Once again the prophecy failed, and once again Sarhili sent a trusted messenger down to the Gxarha to investigate.
Bhotomane, the messenger, returned unimpressed. ‘What is the use of sending me?’ he asked. ‘There is nothing there. The prophet is no one.’4 With a heavy heart, Sarhili informed his followers that the prophecies should be abandoned, and that the people should gather all their breeding cattle to rebuild the national herds. The venerable chief Bhurhu, the King’s uncle, took the lead in denouncing Sarhili’s mismanagement to the assembled crowd. ‘[Sarhili] was sullen and gloomy, [Bhurhu] was savage, and the common people were furious.’5 Despite the criticism, or perhaps because of it, the stubborn King refused to give up hope. A message from Mhlakaza, that the first of the new cattle had arrived, filled him with renewed expectation and he departed once again for the Gxarha, assuring the chiefs that they should not despair: the sayings of Mhlakaza would yet be revealed.6
The reappearance of lungsickness did much to encourage this last wave of cattle-killing, but many of the true believers lacked the cattle to kill. The emphasis of the prophecies switched to promises of abundant maize, and the faithful busied themselves with cleaning their threshing floors and digging enormous storage pits. Messengers from Sarhili hastened into the Colony and Thembuland, summoning the Gcaleka Xhosa to return from food and refuge to a land of inevitable death.7
Tsimbi the prophet died of starvation in August 1857, and Mhlakaza followed him in November.8 The hopes of the believers died forever with the uneventful passage of the so-called ‘moon of wonders’ in June 1857. In as much as Sarhili still had a dream and a hope, it was to start afresh and build a new life by his own endeavours. He wanted to leave Hohita, the Great Place where he had known such evil days, and begin anew at Butterworth, which had been his father Hintsa’s capital. He begged some cattle from neighbouring chiefs and redistributed most of them among his followers. About 150 families gathered at Butterworth and ploughed up extensive new grounds for planting in the new season. They traded their horses and guns for horned cattle and corn to keep themselves alive until the coming harvest. Despite these efforts, Sarhili and his immediate circle were still very much reduced in circumstances. In October 1857, the trader Crouch reported that Sarhili, who had once possessed more than 6 000 oxen of his own, was sharing the milk of seven cows with his brothers and 60 women and children. It was all he had. ‘You may guess he is hard up,’ wrote Crouch in a typically cynical vein, ‘for I know for certain that there have been two horses eaten at [Sarhili’s] place.’9
The ordinary Gcaleka were even worse off.
Large numbers of people – the whole population of kraals may be seen in the open country digging for roots, others gather in the inside bark from the mimosa thorn, and all presenting an abject appearance. Their cattle are all gone excepting a few milk cows – say one cow to 500 souls. They have a few goats from which they get a little milk … Mothers show me their breasts without milk and hundreds of other sad signs of want. Krili [Sarhili] the chief is hungry, and comes to beg of me …10
Sarhili’s country was rapidly denuded of its people through death and emigration. The land was littered with unburied bodies: vultures eating men, and vultures eating dogs, and dogs eating men. Chief Bhurhu, who had been forced into the Cattle-Killing by his sons, was one of these. He refused to flee, but sat down to await death in the empty ruins of his deserted homestead. ‘In spite of this thing that has come over me,’ he declared, ‘I will not serve another man. I will die here on the site of my village.’ Crouch found him a few days later.
I rode over to his place. I found him dead in his hut and one of his wives – the dogs were eating him – his wife must have died the day before I got there – the dogs had eaten a great part of Buru while his wife was alive – this you may rely on as I saw them myself. There is scarcely a hut in this part of the country but you can find dead [Xhosa] in.11
Another notable victim was the Great Councillor Gxabagxaba, who was brought by his sons to St Marks mission destitute even of the will to live. In his youth, Gxabagxaba had killed the Landdrost of Graaff-Reinet, and he had fought in every single one of the Frontier Wars since 1811. He had never believed in the prophecies but had slaughtered his herds out of obedience only, saying that he had obtained all his cattle through the goodness of Sarhili and his father Hintsa, and must yield them up again when asked to do so. He died later the same year, quite literally a ‘raving maniac’.12
Nor was the mass starvation Sarhili’s only worry. Although the Thembu Regent Joyi had begun by showing sympathy for the stricken Xhosa, his attitude had changed under the pressure of Fadana’s revolt. He longed to recover the extensive territory between the Indwe and the Bolotwa, which Sarhili’s father had seized from his father nearly 30 years previously. Fighting between the Thembu and the Xhosa broke out in June 1857, and September and October saw a number of pitched battles. Though starving to death and much reduced in numbers, the frenzied Gcaleka more than held their own. On one memorable occasion, Joyi narrowly escaped with his life, leaving 38 Thembu dead on the field and several drowned trying to flee across a flooded river. But Joyi had time and numbers on his side and hit back repeatedly, killing Sarhili’s Right-Hand brother Ncaphayi in January 1858.13
Sarhili was anxious for a showdown with the Thembu, but he held back for fear of antagonising Joyi’s colonial allies. Ever since the final disappointment in June, he had been striving to open communications with Governor Grey. When the Bishop of Grahamstown visited him in early July, he asked for food to help his people. ‘There would be no help for the idle who would not work,’ retorted the Bishop. Sarhili laughed – it was the sort of reply he had come to expect – and held up his hands,
saying, ‘These are not hard. I cannot work.’ He admitted that it had been a great mistake to listen to the prophecies, but again and again he tried to divert the Bishop’s inordinate curiosity concerning the past to a more meaningful discussion of the measures to be taken in the present. What should Sarhili and his people do now?
The Bishop’s reply when it came was not very satisfactory.
The Missionary comes here to preach the word of God not to give food; it is your duty to provide food for yourselves … We are Christians, and love you, and wish to do you good; but when you bring God’s judgement upon you for your sins, we do not know what is best to do for you.14
Such tortuous reasoning was completely alien to the Xhosa. What it meant was that the Bishop was refusing to assist them. ‘The amaXosa would have helped the English if they had killed their oxen,’ said Sarhili simply. He was very anxious to hear something from the government and, when the Bishop suggested that he seek an interview with Grey, responded that, although nervous, he would meet the Governor if asked to do so.
The Bishop of Grahamstown had done little enough by way of helping Sarhili, but even this was too much for Chief Commissioner Maclean. ‘Your Excellency must not think of asking Krieli to come and see you,’ he urged Grey. ‘He must ask of his own accord.’15 And ask Sarhili did, to little avail. After the failure of indirect messages through the Bishop, the missionary Waters and the trader Crouch, Sarhili summoned Crouch to a formal meeting and, in the presence of a large crowd, entrusted him with the following message to Grey:
I, this day, in the presence of my brothers and counsellors, ask the forgiveness of the Governor for what I have done. I have fallen. I and my family are starving. I ask help from the Governor to save me from dying. I this day place myself in the hands of the Governor. I am willing to come to any terms the Governor may think fit to dictate to me – I wish to be subject to the Governor – I ask the Governor to help me with a plough, oxen and seed; I also ask the Governor to assist me with food for my family, and those of my brothers. If he does not assist us, we must all die of starvation. I this day place myself entirely in his hands.16