by Peires, Jeff
The ideology of non-racialism was new to the Eastern Cape, also the birthplace of the black consciousness movement. It allowed the tiny radical fringe of white Grahamstown to participate in the struggle for freedom, democracy and the new South Africa. We never numbered more than 30 or so, but we included in our ranks three future Deputy Directors-General and an arms dealer. Our organisation, the Grahamstown Democratic Action Committee (GRADAC), was much in demand at community meetings and funerals where we played the role of human shields, protecting the unarmed masses from riot police with automatic weapons perched high on massive yellow riot vehicles.
All this came at a personal price. I was a member of GRADAC and the Grahamstown Rural Committee. Mary-Louise was a member of the Black Sash and the End Conscription Campaign. Some days, I would come home from work to find bearded white men with sunglasses on my lawn ostentatiously taking photographs of my house or handing me one or other magisterial interdict. Other nights, I would step outside for a breath of air to find black strugglers emerging from the bushes in my garden, asking for urgent transport to Port Elizabeth or else a small sum of money to get them there. The Rhodes University administration of the time was remarkably politically obtuse to put it mildly. They seemed embarrassed by the actions of their lecturers and students, unworried by detentions, deportations or the sjambokking of girl students within the precincts of the university. They took the line that there is no smoke without fire, and that the security police would not be detaining us if we had not done something to deserve it. And detain us they did – more than half of all the GRADAC members plus some innocent girl students who had attracted the attention of the bearded men with sunglasses. I myself managed to avoid detention but still remember being interrogated by Sergeant Louw at the Grahamstown Police Station, a huge reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper pasted strategically on the wall behind his head.
Somehow, in the middle of all this, I managed to finish The Dead Will Arise. But life in Grahamstown had long since ceased to be so cosy. The glass ceiling was coming down. The glass walls were closing in. Our oldest son was on the brink of conscription into the apartheid army. And it seemed only a matter of time before the bearded men on our lawn would collide with the black strugglers behind our bushes. A door opened at the University of Transkei, and we drove straight through it.
Arriving in Umtata in January 1989, we found the Transkei homeland under the leadership of General Bantu Holomisa just emerging from the dark repression of the Matanzima era. Holomisa was still playing a double game with the South African authorities, and the Mass Democratic Movement had not yet established itself. The skills and experiences which I had acquired during my years as a member of GRADAC were badly needed in Transkei, and when the political organisations were unbanned in February 1990, I was elected onto the Executive of the Transkei Region of the African National Congress. Thereafter I became a Member of Parliament, representing Engcobo, in South Africa’s first democratically-elected government.
But that is another story. The purpose of these reminiscences, setting out the context in which The Dead Will Arise was written, is to explain how the book became, if not an orphan, then at least a child abandoned by its author. From the time the book was published in 1989, it has had to stand on its own two feet without any help from me. Even when it was confronted with serious challenges, with new interpretations, with what Clifton Crais called ‘the programmatic and analytical vigour of the postmodern critique’1 I was too busy doing other things to defend my book. Even when Ravan Press collapsed and The Dead Will Arise went out of print, I did nothing about it. But the book has endured, in spite of my neglect, and I need to thank Jonathan Ball Publishers for rescuing it and making it once again available in South Africa. Also for giving me this opportunity to update my readers and respond to my critics.
None of the criticism which has appeared since The Dead Will Arise was published has impressed me to the extent that I feel the need to make changes to the original. Apart from one small change to clarify my meaning on p.196, the text in your hands is identical with the first Ravan edition of 1989. The critics have, however, made me very much aware of certain areas of vulnerability, and I am therefore taking the opportunity of this afterword to reinforce some of my arguments with additional material from the primary sources. On the other hand, I have to admit that I have spent too much time at the coalface since 1994 to remain simultaneously at the cutting edge of intellectual debate. I am now a civil servant, not an academic, and I live in a small town without a university, more than 200 kilometres away from the nearest academic library. I still remember everything I knew when I wrote The Dead Will Arise, but my perspectives have not become greatly refined since. Although I deliberately attempted to write The Dead Will Arise in an accessible style that would not quickly date, I must accept, like any other historian, that intellectual perspectives do change and that historical works eventually grow old and become superceded in the course of time. What follows therefore is not meant to be an intransigent defence of every word of The Dead Will Arise, but an attempt to identify and open up the most significant lines of debate and criticism.
More on Mhlakaza
The Dead Will Arise was widely reviewed on publication. It won a national prize for the best work of non-fiction published in South Africa in 1989. Its conclusions were largely endorsed by Noel Mostert’s Frontiers (1992), certainly the most widely read book ever written on the history of the Eastern Cape. Most of the reviewers had something of their own to contribute. I was surprised to find many, even on the left, who felt that I had been too hard on Sir George Grey. ‘There is little point in attacking a colonial governor for being a colonial governor,’ as Jeff Guy put it.2 But the only substantive query that needs to be addressed in these pages is the identification of Archdeacon Merriman’s servant, Wilhelm Goliath, with the cattle-killing prophet, Mhlakaza. The flow of the narrative did not permit me to expand on this identification in the body of the text. I thought I had sufficiently covered the issue in note 103 of Chapter One, but the number of doubters across the ideological spectrum compels me to set out the evidence in full.
It is common cause that Wilhelm Goliath disappears from the written record in January 1853 while Mhlakaza first appears in company with Nongqawuse about April 1856. Despite obvious continuities and consistencies in the trajectory of Goliath/ Mhlakaza, critics as disparate as Helen Bradford, Randolph Vigne and Dr Thami Tisani seem to require a smoking gun proving that the two were one and the same. Fortunately, a smoking gun does indeed exist in the form of a letter dated 4 August 1856 from George Cyrus, the ‘Superintendent of Natives’ in Grahamstown and a fluent Xhosa-speaker since childhood.3 Cyrus had been requested by the lieutenant-governor to proceed to the black settlement at Farmerfield in Lower Albany to investigate certain rumours current in that area. In response, Cyrus details two sets of prophets and prophecies. The first involves Chief Kama, his late father Chungwa and a prophet who is obviously the wife of Bhulu (pp.96-7). But it is the second which interests us more:
It is further currently reported that a Tambookie of the name of Willem Goliat who formerly travelled with the Archdeacon MerryMan has become inspired and whose prophetic words are ‘Fear not race of Black People. Fear not the white man, fear not [the Mfengu] your dogs, remove from the face of the earth all your cattle, they are contaminated, the sooner this is done the sooner will pure stock appear to replace the contaminated stock. I already hear the bellowing of the pure stock. I see them .. [illegible] … I also see a new race of people. Quicken your work; and you will then have your desire.’
We should not be too concerned about the reference to Wilhelm as a Tambookie. We know from Merriman’s journal that he was certainly a Gcaleka. But in those days Gcaleka territory abutted Thembuland north of the amaThole mountain range, and it is not surprising that Xhosa-speakers from Farmerfield near the coast should have muddled the ethnic identity of a man from the north.
Cyrus’s information, or something similar, was also picked up by the Graaff-Reinet Herald which reported on 9 August that ‘the [Xhosa] prophet is a former servant of Archdeacon Merriman’. Governor Grey must have heard something more because, in his first cattle-killing dispatch to London, he enters into details not mentioned by Cyrus, namely that the Xhosa prophet ‘who there is reason to believe is partially deranged’ had been ‘in service with Europeans some years ago’ and had ‘caused his employers trouble from visions which he claimed to have seen’. Grey does not name the employers but the incident is very similar to that recounted by Mrs Merriman nearly 40 years later.4
This evidence was sufficient to convince me that Mhlakaza and Wilhelm were the same person. The publication of The Dead Will Arise turned up additional evidence, courtesy of Dr Robert Ross of the University of Leiden. Dr Ross kindly furnished me with an extract from Berichten uit de Heiden Wereld (1857) which published the following interesting letter from Brother Kölbing, the Moravian missionary at Genadendal in the Western Cape.5 Brother Kölbing wrote as follows:
The name of the prophet is Umhlakaza … but we understand that he was earlier in service with Archdeacon Merriman, and he is the same one that once had a plan to come to Genadendal to act in our seminary as a schoolteacher while at the same time being trained in tailoring work.
In addition to confirming that Mhlakaza was previously Merriman’s servant, this letter probably also sheds light on his last weeks in the Colony after he had started to irritate the Merrimans. Merriman had packed Mhlakaza off to teach at Southwell near Grahamstown early in 1853, but it is clear from Kölbing’s letter that plans were afoot to remove him even further.
Grey’s discretion in keeping Merriman’s name out of his dispatch to London set a precedent for the cover-up to follow. The Church of England was not only the established church of the British Empire, it was Grey’s own church, the church which he himself had propelled into the mission field with Archdeacon Merriman’s enthusiastic assistance. The very thought that Christian education would produce not black Englishmen but heterodox anti-colonial prophets would have been anathema to Grey’s vaunted strategy of changing enemies into friends [Ch. 2 (2)] let alone scandalising Merriman’s good name. Beyond this, as we have seen, the more the cattle-killing progressed, the more Grey turned it to his advantage, and the more important it was to conceive of the prophet as the willing and conscious tool of warlike chiefs, rather than as the deranged former servant of an eminent Anglican churchman.
Not much on Nongqawuse
The 15 years since the publication of The Dead Will Arise have not, unfortunately, brought forth any new information on Nongqawuse. It is important to emphasise how little we actually know for sure about the prophetess herself. We have her photograph, it is true, but a photograph in captivity, dressed up by Mrs Gawler, taken two years after she began to prophesy. It tells us nothing. We have very few direct first-hand reports from the Gxarha and, with only one exception, these tell us what ‘the girl’ said or did, not what she looked like. Nor do we have any quoted direct speech from Nongqawuse, nothing beyond the reported messages of the strangers, nothing that can give us a hint of her choice of words or her turn of speech. We do have a so-called ‘Deposition of Nonqause’ at Fort Murray6, but this can be dismissed as a concoction by Maclean and Gawler in support of the ‘chiefs’ plot’. We do have the valuable account of WW Gqoba, but we also need to remember that it is a second-hand account compiled from several informants 30 years later.7 Basically, we are left with only three pieces of evidence:
The first is the description of Nongqawuse by a police informant, as quoted on p.110:
A girl of about 16 years of age, has a silly look, and appeared to me as if she was not right in her mind. She was not besmeared with clay, nor did she seem to me take any pains with her appearance.
The second piece of evidence – which must be used with great caution – is the record of an interrogation of Nongqawuse, also at Fort Murray, also by Major Gawler, but never printed or used in the ‘Chiefs’ Plot’ show trials.8
• Do you know Nombanda who lived near your kraal, and if so state all you know about her?
• Nombanda was sent for by the chiefs to bear witness to what I was saying, afterwards when I got ill she used to conduct the talking. She talked a great deal more than I did – the first day she went with me she could neither see the people nor hear them talk
This indication of the relationship between Nongqawuse and Nombanda is largely confirmed by the entirely reliable statement of Mjuza, the son of a prophet-turned-policeman. Mjuza led the police party which captured Nombanda, whom he described as follows:9
One of Umhlakaza’s prophetesses, and one who spoke equally as much as, and frequently preferred to Nonqause, – and better liked by the chiefs.
This is not much to go on, and on pages 328-9 of The Dead Will Arise, where I tried to consolidate the scattered references in the narrative, I said all that I thought we could be sure of. My version has, however, been fiercely attacked by the feminist Helen Bradford, who has challenged my interpretation of the relations between Mhlakaza and Nongqawuse as well as my interpretation of Nongqawuse’s mental state. I will return to Bradford in the next section, but as these questions are also of general interest, I will try to delve more deeply here.
Since no new information has come to light, most of what follows depends on insights gained from comparative sources. In addressing the problem in this way, I also hope to placate the many reviewers who have reproached me for apparently failing to notice that the cattle-killing was a millenarian movement and for failing to make any reference to the vast theoretical and comparative literature on millenarianism.
Millenarian movements10 – movements which believe that the earthly world will be miraculously and totally transformed by divine intervention – have appeared on all continents over many centuries. If they had never actually existed, they might well have been invented by an American college class on Comparative World History. As a graduate myself of just such a college class, I was of course aware of this literature, and I studied it intensively while I was preparing to write this book. It would have been easy for me to compare Nongqawuse to the drummer boy of Niklashausen (Germany 1470), Sabbatai Sevi (Ottoman Empire 1660), Handsome Lake (Iroquoi North America 1780), Hung Hsiu-ch’uan (China 1850), Antonio the Councillor (Brazil 1870), Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi (Sudan 1880), Simon Kimbangu (Congo 1920), ‘Ras Tafari’ (Jamaica 1930), ‘John Frum’ (New Hebrides 1940), Alice Lenshina (Zambia 1960) and many many more, more in Africa than anywhere else. But to what end? I could have dazzled my readers with my erudition and my virtuosity, but I would have lost them in the process. I could have made many explanations, but the explanations would have been harder to understand than the things to be explained. That was not the kind of book I wanted to write.
The Dead Will Arise was written in the spirit of theoretical practice, in other words my theoretical knowledge shaped my understanding and my interpretation of the primary sources, and expressed itself implicitly in the text. I would like to believe that specialists in millenarian movements and the anthropology of religion might have been able to discern my intellectual influences, and to deploy the cattle-killing data in more theoretical studies than this one. My only reason for making reference to the comparative literature at this point is that it does help us to clarify important aspects of Nongqawuse’s role and her presumed relationship to Mhlakaza.
The most important theoretical reference for our purposes is Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound (1970).11 Worsley is concerned to refute the common understanding of prophetic movements as derived from ‘charisma’, that is the personal magnetism of the prophet. He makes two critical points:
1. What is important is not the personal character of the prophet but the relevance of the message to the situation in which people find themselves. That is why many p
rophets are insignificant, oddly behaved, absent or even dead.
2. But the message alone is not enough. The promises of the movement need to be credible, the truth of the prophecy needs to be confirmed by signs and proofs.
I would add a third point to the above:
3. Millenarian movements, being religious in nature, need to be validated in religious terms. The prophet is therefore required to demonstrate some mark of divine attention. Moreover, even though the believers do experience the presence of the divinity in their daily lives, the expected intervention is much vaster in scale than anything ever seen before. Much more is therefore expected from the millenarian prophet than from the average seer or diviner. But the believers do not prescribe the nature of the ‘much more’, they await it as a revelation from above. Hence the paradox that the more extraordinary, indeed the more dysfunctional the prophet’s behaviour, the more it confirms his or her divine status.
Millenarian movements are therefore faced by an inner contradiction at their core. They demand, on the one hand, a prophet who can clearly demonstrate a connection with the divine entity by extraordinary powers and acts. On the other hand, the movement needs to provide the signs and proofs to confirm the truth of the message and reassure the believers when doubts begin to creep in. But individuals who are divinely inspired are rarely capable of providing concrete signs and proofs in the real world, though this does occasionally happen, as in the case of the Sudanese Mahdi.