The Xhosa Cattle Killing

Mass resistance, not mass suicide

One morning in 1856, a fifteen year old Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse went with another girl to scare birds from her uncle's crops in the fields by the sea at the Gxarha river mouth in the present day Wild Coast area of South Africa. When she returned she said that she had seen a man, who had told her that 'The whole community would rise from the dead ; that all cattle now living must be slaughtered'. The girls returned home and told their families what had happened but they were not believed. Later, however, when Nongqawuse described one of the men, her uncle Mhalakaza, himself a diviner, recognised the description as that of his dead brother, and became convinced she was telling the truth.

As a result, between April 1856 and June 1857, the various sections of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape and the Transkei slaughtered almost all their enormous stocks of cattle and deliberately killed their crops. This apocalyptic event, rather than being some kind of 'mass suicide'as described by early colonial historians, was actually the earliest example of a mass 'passive resistance' movement in South Africa. The themes and symbols of the Cattle-Killing can be found in the various resistance movements of South Africa right into the modern era.

Nongqawuse and Mhalakaza said that those who had appeared to them were the spirits of their dead ancestors, who had come back to life in order to bring the Xhosa nation back to its former glory  and to 'render the Xhosa the assistance they required in order to drive the white man out of the land'.

A few days later Mhalakaza met with the spirits himself, and said that all the dead of the Xhosa nation would arise again, that they would come up out of the sea, bringing with them new and uncontaminated cattle, along with 'sheep, goats, dogs, fowls and every other animal that was wanted, and all clothes and everything they could wish for to eat. . .  and all kinds of things for their houses.'  The cattle, said Nongqawuse, were at present in underground caverns waiting to arise and start a new world for the purified Xhosa people. On the day of their coming, she promised, 'the blind would see, the deaf would hear, cripples would walk, and the whole Xhosa nation would arise from the dead' and begin a golden age without disease, death or misfortune.