Refashioning Sub-National Pasts for Post-National Futures: The Xhosa Cattle Killing in Recent South African Literature

Abstract

The ‘sub-national past’ in my title is an anti-colonial millenarian movement in southern Africa, the Xhosa cattle killing of 1856–57. During the first half of the 19th century, the Xhosa people had fought a series of wars against the British Cape Colony, whose eastern frontier steadily encroached into Xhosa territory. By the 1850s, the amaXhosa had faced not only decades of colonial encroachment and assaults on their chiefs’ authority by Cape Colony Governor Sir George Grey (1854–61), but also drought, crop blight and an unprecedented epidemic of bovine lungsickness, a disease that devastated the herds of cattle in which the Xhosa economy, culture and identity were centred. In the midst of these challenges, the 1850s saw the rise of several millenarian prophecies among the amaXhosa, which culminated in a prophecy delivered in 1856 by a young woman known as Nongqawuse, who claimed to have been visited by ancestors long dead. They promised the return of ancestor-warriors who would help the amaXhosa to drive the whites into the sea, but only if they killed their cattle and threw away their grain — in other words, only if they destroyed their culture and livelihood. Over 400,000 cattle were killed in compliance with the cattle-killing prophecy, and when the ancestors and new cattle failed to appear as promised in 1857, approximately 40,000 people died of starvation and 50,000 more left their land to seek food and work in the Cape Colony.