The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7

Jeffrey Peires is a historian who has published extensively on the nineteenth century Eastern Cape frontier, and this book, first published in 1989 and awarded South Africa's Alan Paton Award for non-fiction the following year, remains the only book length scholarly narrative of the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856 and 1857. Peires drew on colonial administrative and missionary archives alongside oral testimony, and his identification of Nongqawuse's uncle Mhlakaza as a man previously employed by an Anglican archdeacon is among its most influential findings. The book explicitly set out to test, and reject, two rival explanations current at the time, that Xhosa chiefs had engineered the killing as a war plot and that colonial Governor Sir George Grey had engineered it to seize land, and its conclusions on both points are widely accepted, though this record states plainly that later historians, Helen Bradford among them, have argued the book still under-reads Xhosa social agency on its own terms. Use it as the standard narrative history of the events; read Bradford alongside it for a differing scholarly reading of the same record.