Nongqawuse

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Nongqawuse was a young Xhosa woman, orphaned early in life and raised by her uncle Mhlakaza, who from April 1856 reported visions of ancestor spirits at the mouth of the Gxarha River in the Eastern Cape. Mhlakaza served as her principal interpreter and promoter to the Xhosa chiefs, a role that carried the visions from a single young woman's report into a matter the wider Xhosa chiefdoms would take seriously. Research by the historian Jeff Peires identifies Mhlakaza as probably the same man as Wilhelm Goliat, once a servant and companion to an Anglican archdeacon, a background that helps account for the Christian elements woven through the prophecy he promoted.

The visions carried a specific instruction, that the Xhosa people must kill their cattle, already dying in large numbers of an introduced lung sickness, and destroy their stored grain, so that the ancestors would return and drive out the colonial presence on the frontier. Paramount Chief Sarhili of the Gcaleka Xhosa believed the visions and lent them his authority across the wider Xhosa chiefdoms, a decision that carried Nongqawuse's reported prophecy from a local report into a movement affecting an entire people, well beyond anything a single uncle's promotion could have achieved alone.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The resurrection Nongqawuse had promised, after earlier dates passed without it occurring, was fixed for 18 February 1857 as the day the ancestors would rise and drive the colonists from Xhosa land. When that day too passed without event, the consequences fell on a people who had already killed most of their cattle and destroyed their grain stores in compliance with the prophecy Mhlakaza had promoted and Paramount Chief Sarhili had endorsed across the Gcaleka Xhosa chiefdoms.

Catastrophic famine followed, striking a population that had deliberately given up the food supply that would otherwise have carried it through hardship, a self inflicted vulnerability that made the disaster far worse than a poor harvest alone would have caused. Colonial authorities took Nongqawuse into custody for a period after the famine had run its course, holding the young woman whose reported visions had set the whole episode in motion.

Her later life is far less fully documented than the events of 1856 and 1857 themselves. Records describe her living afterward under a different name on a farm in the Alexandria district of the Eastern Cape, apart from the chiefdoms whose catastrophic losses had followed her prophecy, until her death there in 1898, four decades after the visions at the Gxarha River had first reached Mhlakaza's ears.