On 24 May 1921, nearly two hundred members of Enoch Mgijima's Israelite sect were massacred in a brief, bloody clash with a contingent of South African police at Bullhoek, a rural African village situated about twenty-five miles from Queenstown in eastern Cape.1 The massacre was outcome of a lengthy confrontation between South African state and Mgijima's Israelites, who had been called in 1919 by their prophet to congregate at their holy city, Ntabelanga, and await an approaching millennium. For well over a year, South African officials, first on a local and then on a national level, had negotiated laboriously with Israelites, hoping to persuade sect to move peacefully off land which government said it was occupying illegally. Finally, after failing at all attempts at negotiation and suspecting that Israelites were plotting a rebellion, South African government dispatched a police force to remove Israelites, who resisted courageously but futilely. The carnage at Bullhoek shocked most contemporary observers, but any outrage over government mishandling of affair was tempered by fact that Israelites were also accused of organizing a revolt against European rule. During course of parliamentary debate on massacre, John X. Merriman raised point that Israelite religious beliefs were imbued with seditious ideas. Anybody who studied it saw that it was a very dangerous thing indeed. The idea was that Africa for Africans, that Africans must combine and sweep white man out of country.2 The example of Israelites resurrected latent suspicions of many white South Africans that African independent churches in general were potentially subversive movements which had to be monitored closely. Many writers advanced sweeping theories to explain diabolical nature that lay behind movement. Rev. Allen Lea, who published a book on separatist churches, labeled Israelites a fanatical politico-religious movement, a pathetic example of the
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jan 1, 1985
+ 1
Open Access