Dead will Arise

by Peires, Jeff

  Lewis’s analysis does not sufficiently account for the dominant role played by the chiefs, whether for or against the cattle-killing movement. Moreover, he argues as if Xhosa society was still a self-contained entity, socially insulated from the outside world, confined as it were in a pressure-cooker with no way out but to kill all its cattle. Lewis discounts the extent to which the Xhosa social formation had been penetrated by colonial and capitalist elements over a period of more than 50 years. The material base of the split between the believers and the unbelievers, the class division if you like, was not based on an internal contradiction within and between the indigenous classes of Xhosa society but on the contradiction between a moribund pre-capitalist social formation and the nascent pro-capitalist classes. Obviously, there were tensions within the remnant of the pre-capitalist formation, tensions between men and women, old and young, chiefs and commoners, but that is precisely why ideology played such an important role as a unifying factor and why ideology had to be given such a prominent place in The Dead Will Arise.

  Timothy J Stapleton, a Canadian historian, has somehow appointed himself guardian of Maqoma’s reputation.20 He is accordingly very troubled by the great man’s active participation in the cattle-killing on the side of the believers.

  In 1856 [Maqoma] sanctioned a movement that sacrificed all he had striven to maintain. Why did such an intelligent man allow this apocalypse to occur? What were his personal motivations? To what extent have false colonial accusations against Maqoma been retained in the conventional histories?

  In an attempt to exculpate his hero from the weight of the evidence against him, Stapleton comes up with an argument which has at least the benefit of originality. Cattle were the instrument of chiefly control. Ergo, the cattle killers were nothing but peasant revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the power of the chiefs. The cattle-killing movement, in Stapleton’s opinion, ‘bears striking similarity to peasant uprisings in medieval Europe which sought to destroy everything connected with the feudal hierarchy’. But what about the considerable evidence that chiefs like Maqoma fully backed the movement, and even extended its scope by forcing their subjects to refrain from cultivation? Stapleton is ready with a reply. Yes, clever chiefs like Maqoma did kill their cattle and they did enforce a ban on cultivation. But they did so as a ploy to retain their positions, and to show the commoners the error of their ways through a sort of Xhosa reductio ad absurdum.

  It would be tortuous indeed to refute all the convolutions of Stapleton’s ingenious but incredible arguments. The spin he puts on Maqoma’s message to Sandile [‘Are you a chief and led by black men’ – see p.185] is wondrous to behold. Stapleton’s argument, like Bradford’s, can easily be refuted by reference to the incident in Gqoba, already quoted, where Nongqawuse deliberately gives preference to male chiefs above all other enquirers. More examples could easily be given, but suffice it to say that there is no indication, not even a hint, that the cattle-killing prophecies were geared to one or other class or faction within Xhosa society. Rather there is every sign and indication that the cattle-killing was national in character, driven by Sarhili and the believing chiefs as custodians of the national good, and intended not to destroy the old order but to restore it in all its pristine glory.

  Post-modernist

  While I was still fully occupied with the National Democratic Struggle, word reached Umtata that a new race of giants had appeared on earth, especially those parts of earth inhabited by graduate seminars and university tearooms. These giants had names like Frederick Jameson and Pierre Bourdieu, and some such as Hayden White and Michel de Certeau seemed to specialise in my own field of history. They constituted a whole new school of analysis usually referred to as post-modernism, which concentrated mainly on the way in which human perceptions are shaped by cultural attitudes. Social reality cannot, for example, be simply taken for granted as a datum in itself but should be understood as something constructed according to the cognitions and discourses of specific sets of people operating in specific places at specific times. Within the field of South African history, post-modernism made its most immediate impact on KwaZulu-Natal, informing us, for example, that ‘“Shaka” is in every sense a verbal construct’ and inspiring properly sussed academics to write papers about ‘the production of Shaka’ and ‘the authoring of Shaka’ rather than about Shaka himself.21

  My instinctive response to all of this was that, shorn of its grandiose conceptions, post-modernism amounts to little more that an emphasis on textual analysis and source criticism, which we historians have been doing for many years anyway. It is as if someone was researching in a hall of mirrors and became totally preoccupied with the mirrors to the exclusion of the reality which the mirrors, however distortedly, were trying to reflect. However there is nothing that reveals one’s ignorance more than sneering at something one does not understand, and I would prefer to make the frank admission that I have never read Jaques Derrida or Hayden White or Greg Dening’s allegedly seminal work on the Marquesa Islands. What I can do, however, is to take a closer look at Clifton Crais and Adam Ashforth, two historians who have approached The Dead Will Arise through a post-modernist perspective, and to try to respond to their critique as best I can.

  Clifton Crais is the only historian of the Eastern Cape writing in the post-modernist tradition. His book, The Making of the Colonial Order: White Supremacy and Black Resistance in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865, has a chapter on the cattle-killing, but I would prefer to begin with his review of The Dead Will Arise which appeared in the South African Historical Journal (1991). Crais starts with a number of comments that I find totally incomprehensible, for example that ‘Peires gives remarkably little attention to cosmology’, but he proceeds to a criticism that I cannot but endorse:

  The book is unselfconsciously constructed within a questionable division between the material and the ideological. It is as if the Xhosa were living within a false consciousness and Peires, the objective historian somehow outside history, and is now providing them (and us) with the truth.

  Similar criticisms are expressed by Adam Ashforth, not an Eastern Cape specialist but a distinguished author whose book on The Politics of Official Discourse in 20th Century South Africa was published by Oxford University Press.22 Like Crais, Ashforth criticises the assumption implicit in The Dead Will Arise that ‘evidence exists independently of the subjective standpoint of the historian’. Ashforth further criticises my description of the cattle-killing as a ‘logical and rational … response’, arguing that I have imposed a European model of rationality onto the nineteenth-century Xhosa. He also feels that I should have done more to draw on the popular memory and interpretations of the descendants of the cattle killers.

  For people whose ancestors are always with them, and whose present lives are not only shaped by the burden of their ancestors’ doings but are lived in a continuing dialogue with preceding generations, the nature of happenings four or five generations previous might not just be things of the disembodied past.

  I now realise that it was a mistake to use culturally loaded words like ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ in The Dead Will Arise, pages 12, 146 and 332 for example. I am by no means married to these terms, and am quite happy to accept ‘understandable’ as suggested by Ashforth or ‘intelligible’ as proposed by Jeff Guy. One might also substitute culturally neutral terms like ‘credible’, ‘comprehensible’ and ‘consistent with existing beliefs’ without in any way altering the meaning or implications of the text.

  My employment of words like ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ arose out of an over-reaction to racist and colonial interpretations which saw the movement as primitive, superstitious, exotic or bizarre. But, in addition, I should point out that while writing The Dead Will Arise, I was greatly fascinated by the resilience of the cattle-killing movement and by its capacity to sustain the belief of its adherents in the face of repeated disappointments. I was therefore very concerned t
o break down the movement into phases, and to relate the mutations of its prophecies to setbacks such as the First Disappointment (p.124) and the apostasy of Nxito (p.170). Although it is nowhere specified in the text, it was this flexible and adaptable quality, this ability to explain away every failure by means of a coherent and reasonable argument, that led me to dub the cattle-killing ‘rational’ in spite of the inherent hopelessness of its premises and its predictions. My approach throughout was guided by the example of two of the most outstanding volumes in the millenarian canon: Peter Lawrence’s Road Belong Cargo (1964) which traces cargo beliefs through five successive incarnations in a single small area of New Guinea, and Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails (1956) which records the reactions of a Chicago flying saucer cult to the repeated failure of their expectations. Beyond these two books, I must also acknowledge my intellectual debt to EE Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), surely one of the greatest and most enduring anthropological works ever written and still the starting-point for any academic study of African religion.23

  Ashforth and Crais feel that there must be something more, a more indigenous and authentic explanation than that offered by The Dead Will Arise which Ashforth calls ‘an exercise in translation only’. I don’t disagree. In fact I can say without any false humility that I entirely accept my role as a translator over centuries and between cultures and I never sought to achieve anything more than that. The post-modernists, on the other hand, show no sign so far of achieving even as much. It is all very well for Crais to expatiate on the importance of considering ‘prophetic visions as poetic texts’ and demanding ‘an explicit engagement with questions of representation’. But what does this mean in practice given the almost total lack of direct evidence by the believers themselves? Crais himself has tried to give a post-modernist analysis of the Cattle-Killing in Chapter 10 of his book, The Making of the Colonial Order. Crais’s idea of a ‘poetic text’ is the conflation of Gqoba’s account (a newspaper article by a Christian journalist written 30 years later and translated into English) and Nonkosi’s statement (as recorded in English under interrogation by a white colonial magistrate with a case to prosecute). In place of ‘authentic representations’, Crais comes up with misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Xhosa words like ‘inqaba’ [fortress] and ‘ikubalo’ [roots]. His major innovation on the cosmological front is to promote the ‘abantu bomlambo’ [river people], a kind of little league beastie mentioned nowhere in the Xhosa or English texts, to the premier division status of ancestors, and to make them responsible for the whole thing. For good measure, he also throws in a lot of words like ‘liminal’ and ‘uterine’ that don’t even appear in Fischer’s standard English-Xhosa dictionary.24 If this is the promised ‘history of the experience of consciousness’, we are really in trouble.

  Ashforth’s suggestion of consulting the descendants of the cattle-killers is not much more helpful. Stapleton tried this on Maqoma’s descendants, and all he got from them was a flat denial that their ancestor had ever contemplated such foolishness. The last evidence of anybody still thinking that Nongqawuse might have been telling the truth was recorded in 1877.25 I am not the only one who thinks that the movement was a ‘foolish mistake.’ I have never met anyone, Xhosa people least of all, who thinks otherwise. The only question is who to blame, Nongqawuse or Sir George Grey? Like Ashforth, I am bothered by the fact of being a white historian refuting ‘a whole people’s understanding of their past’. But my concern is a political concern, and not because I feel that I have missed out on the possibility of discovering some alternative truth.

  Suicide or genocide? African perceptions of the Nongqawuse catastrophe

  Readers of this afterword have frequently encountered the name of WW Gqoba, our only Xhosa-language primary source. Non-Xhosa readers can get a taste of Gqoba’s prose from AC Jordan’s convenient translation.26 Most Xhosa readers will have had to depend on the abridged version published in Rubusana’s anthology. Very few readers have had access to the original Isigidimi samaXosa of 1888, which alone contains the whole of Gqoba’s original text and the valuable correspondence which it evoked. As one of these privileged few, I can only say that Gqoba’s is a profound text in the true sense of the word. Every time I look at it, I find something new and wonderful which I had not noticed before. Let me take as an example the following passage, which I entirely overlooked while writing The Dead Will Arise.

  It is said there is another chief who used to ride a ngwevu horse, his name was Ngwevu, otherwise called Satan. It was said that every person who did not slaughter all his cattle was a person of that chief who was Satan. Such a person would never see the blessing of our Chief, Naphakade, the son of Sifubasibanzi.

  This passage vividly reminds us of the extent to which the cattle-killing was infused with Christian elements, but it only acquires its full significance once one registers that ngwevu is the Xhosa word for the colour grey, and that the Chief Satan here referred to is none other than Sir George Grey himself. One can only applaud Gqoba, a Christian convert writing in a mission newspaper, for the subtle method he uses to convey his meaning in spite of missionary and colonial censorship. In so doing, he not only articulates the perception of many Xhosa that Governor Grey was the devil incarnate, but he also demonstrates the extent to which Xhosa society had become polarised, as well as the political pressures to which the unbelievers were subjected.

  But clever as Gqoba was in expressing his real views, there were limits on how far he could stick his neck out. His explicit purpose in writing his articles was to contradict the ‘chiefs’ plot’ orthodoxy of the colonial establishment, including his white missionary sponsors. Beyond this challenge, Gqoba never dared to go. He confined imself to his narrative and never expressed any further opinion about Grey, or colonial policy, or the reasons for the cattle-killing. Gqoba’s text is so valuable, so informative and so authentic that its silences are all the more glaring and deafening. His Xhosa-language successors inherited these silences but unfortunately they did little to collect other traditions or to fill up the gaps in Gqoba’s narrative with additional information. Either that or they were, like Gqoba, constrained by the missionary stranglehold on the Xhosa-language press. There is reason to think that SEK Mqhayi discussed the cattle-killing in his lost biography of Dr Rubusana, and it is widely believed that a history textbook written by Mr RGS Makalima of the University of Fort Hare was suppressed because it told the truth about Nongqawuse.27 But it is only very recently that a Xhosa-speaking historian, Dr NC Tisani, has emerged to critique The Dead Will Arise. It is not possible to do justice to her remarks over here, but she is broadly supportive of the general interpretation although she would have laid more stress on the Christian origins of the resurrection ideology and on the desperation to which the Xhosa people had been reduced.28

  There is literally no other available written interpretation of the cattle-killing movement by a Xhosa-speaking historian. (It might, however, be necessary to warn the unwary that ‘Nosipho Majeke’, who features an account of the cattle-killing in her The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest was in fact a white radical named Dora Taylor).29 That Xhosa-speakers remain deeply interested in the cattle-killing and continuously grapple with its significance and its implications is evident from the number of major literary works devoted to the subject over a number of years. These include HIE Dhlomo’s The Girl Who Killed to Save (1935), JJR Jolobe’s ‘Ingqawule’ (1959),30 Mtutuzeli Matshoba’s Call Me Not a Man (1979) and, above all, Zakes Mda’s acclaimed The Heart of Redness (2000). The significance of the cattle-killing to Africa and the worldwide African diaspora has been captured by the distinguished African-American novelist John Edgar Wideman in his 1996 novel, entitled most simply The Cattle-Killing. These works of creative fiction inhabit a different order of reality to mine, and I do not think it at all appropriate to comment on their contents. I am sincerely honoured by the notice that Zakes Mda has take
n of The Dead Will Arise, but for me to engage with The Heart of Redness, however delightful it might be to post-modernists, would be fair neither to Zakes or myself.

  The only contemporary Xhosa critique of The Dead Will Arise, apart from Dr Tisani’s, is oral, just as the only Xhosa primary source for the cattle-killing, apart from WW Gqoba, is oral. And just as the overwhelming consensus among Xhosa oral historians is that Sir George Grey was responsible, so the overwhelming Xhosa reaction to The Dead Will Arise is that it is acceptable only to the extent that it admits Grey’s responsibility. After I had finished The Dead Will Arise, I taught for five years at the University of Transkei, and in every one of those five years I gave two lectures on the cattle-killing movement to Xhosa-speaking second-year university students. Never were my lectures so well-attended, never were the students more attentive, never were the questions so many and so varied. The question which really got discussion going was a simple one: Who were the strangers who appeared to Nongqawuse? Were they the physical agents of Sir George Grey? Or were they simply constructs of Nongqawuse’s imagination? I am not disappointed to report that the house never reached consensus on the issue. I still think, as I wrote on p.329, that ‘the weight of probability must be that the strangers seen by Nongqawuse never existed’, but I would like to believe that The Dead Will Arise is also useful to people who think differently from myself.

  Curiously, my lectures were only challenged on one point by the University of Transkei history students. The challenge was fierce and it happened every year. The point so hotly contested related to the location of Nongqawuse’s grave. I had placed it at Alexandria near Port Elizabeth (p.356), but the students were convinced that it was located in Idutywa District near the Mbashe River. So intense was their conviction that I had to reopen my investigations. Eventually, I was enlightened by Mrs Vena, who originated in that very part of Idutywa and taught history at the old Transkei College of Education. She informed me that the place in question was formerly occupied by a white trader who had the habit of invoking Nongqawuse’s name every time a customer promised to pay him at a later date. The trader thus acquired the nickname of Nongqawuse, and the name stuck to the trading store long after the trader himself had moved on.