EMANDULO’s ‘Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing’

By Himal Ramji

EMANDULO now features an exciting new offering which takes on the history of Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing (1856-7). Conceptualised and researched by me, working with a multi-disciplinary team, the presentation provides viewers with an introduction to the events of the time and to their interpretation subsequently. It also offers access to various vernacular histories and sources related to the event. This is the first time many of these sources have been digitised and made freely available to the general public. A highlight of the presentation is a podcast featuring an oration of the 1888 contributions of William Wellington Gqoba.

What does EMANDULO’s Cattle Killing contain?

The main text of the site comprises a concise narrative history of the event. This includes a basic story of what happened from Nongqawuse’s first interaction with those she recognised as the dead in April 1856, until the early aftermath of the cattle killing in 1858 when many amaXhosa chiefs were imprisoned on Robben Island.

This historical narrative is supplemented by a series of short texts which add context and background to the main story. These are accessible through a series of blue buttons which run along the right-hand-side of the text.

‘100 Years of War’ gives a brief history of the many ‘Frontier Wars’ which began in 1779 and ended in 1879. ‘AmaXhosa Notables’ provides a short description of some of the important characters in the story. ‘Lungsickness’ deals with the importation of cattle disease into the region and explores the reasons why people were killing their cattle even before Nongqawuse emerged. ‘Plots’ explores the two contesting theories of why the cattle killing occurred: the chiefs’ war plot, and Governor Grey’s plot. ‘Global anti-colonialism’ gives some detail on features shared by the cattle killing movement and other similar anti-colonial movements across the world around the same time. ‘Millenarianism’ explains the concept which has come to characterise the cattle killing movement.

The site also includes a themed bibliography, organised in terms of ‘Colonial documents’, ‘The endurance of W.W. Gqoba’, ‘Academic studies’, ‘Poetry and izibongo’, ‘Creative representations’, and ‘Political rhetoric’. The themes aim to support readers’ navigation through different types of texts. The bibliography includes followable links to digitised sources, which are also accessible directly via the footnotes throughout the text. Included in this collection are works by W.W. Gqoba, Walter Rubusana, S.E.K. Mqhayi, H.I.E. Dhlomo, J.J.R. Jolobe, and D.L.P. Yali-Manisi. The presentation teams hope that this collection will expand over time through public engagement.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the presentation is the original podcast. For this, the team took Gqoba’s 1888 articles in Isigidimi samaXosa, entitled ‘Isizatu sokuxelwa kwe nkomo ngoNongqause’, and reworked them into a contextualised and listenable form. Mirroring Gqoba’s original work, it is divided into two parts. Each episode begins with an introduction narrated by APC researcher Sanele kaNtshingana, followed by the oration of Gqoba’s articles by Lulamile Nikani under the direction of Mandla Mbothwe. The podcast was produced by Erik Mulder and also features the original musical composition of APC associate, Thokozani Mhlambi.

We chose to make a podcast primarily because it would help expand audience and access, engaging people who do not readily read or who wish to engage with the text on-the-go. The podcast animates the text, bringing it to life through the artistry of performance.

Why did we do it?

Our primary goal was to create a public history resource which could lend itself to history education for both adults and children. However, we also wanted to deal with issues of access to knowledge, particularly concerning the works of African intellectuals.

In recent years, the global move to digitise archival materials has gained momentum. The benefits of such digitisation are twofold: it safeguards these materials from destruction or damage, in a sense prolonging their lives; and it increases access to these materials, particularly for those residing far from where the materials are housed. This has occurred alongside a move to popularise the works of African intellectuals, and to re-enter them into the worlds of intellectual work and discourse.

I was about a year into my PhD (on the cattle killing) when Covid-19 struck, and the South African government implemented a hard lockdown. Libraries and archives became inaccessible. Soon after, a wildfire destroyed the African Studies Library at UCT, and with it, many rare publications and documents perished.

In those months, I searched for whatever resources I could find online. What I found was that certain types of text by certain types of authors were more easily accessible online. As such, popular opinion and knowledge of the cattle killing appeared to be shaped by a very limited pool of resources.

My first search was of academic texts. These mostly require institutional access, and so the audience is extremely limited. My own ease of access was due only to my affiliation with UCT. Language, too, becomes an issue since academic literature on the topic has tended to be written in English. Explorations by Anglophone intellectuals have often sidestepped vernacular histories and sources, often mentioning them but never really dealing with them in any analytic depth. Usually, such analyses quickly move on to English-language stories of the cattle killing, simply because they are more convenient studies for the Anglophone author. As such, the erasure of African-language interactions with the story is reproduced over and over again in academic discourses.

More widely accessible are the various books written on the cattle killing. But as with academic journals, money becomes the primary impediment of access to knowledge. Online, books about the cattle killing can be purchased as e-books, but can also be acquired through pirate methods, which have become integral to academic study since many students cannot afford expensive books.

For instance, Jeff Peires’ The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856-7 (1989) is priced on Amazon at $8.04 (approximately R123) for Kindle, and $28 (approximately R430) for paperback. Jennifer Wenzel’s Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anti-colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (2009) is priced by the same seller at $31.99 (approximately R500) for Kindle, $99 (approximately R1500) for hardcover, and $34 (approximately R530) for softcover.

Quite differently, Tim Couzens and Nick Visser’s H.I.E. Dhlomo: Collected Works is out of print and was one of the resources lost during the fire which incinerated UCT’s African Studies Library in April 2021. In the case of the texts by Dhlomo and many others, the publications have not been digitised, and so they are not available online, for free or even for a fee.

What has been selected for digitisation by previous groups or individuals makes for interesting analysis. Digitised versions of old colonial literature are available online, including John Aitkins Chalmers’ Tiyo Soga and Charles Brownlee’s Reminiscences. In my search, I found that there was a distinct lack of presence of the works of African authors available on the internet – especially for free. The problem is that this makes it seem as if black authors were not writing about the cattle killing. This lack of presence is reproduced by other digital public history platforms, like South African History Online and Wikipedia.

But various African intellectuals did indeed write on the cattle killing.

In March and April 1888, William Wellington Gqoba published two articles entitled, ‘Isizatu sokuxelwa kwe nkomo ngoNongqause’, which is widely accepted as the first isiXhosa version of the history. In 1906, Walter Rubusana published an abridgement of Gqoba’s texts in his collected Zemk’ Inkomo Magwalandini. This was subsequently translated into English in the 1960s by A.C. Jordan in the periodical Africa South, and posthumously re-published in his 1973 collection Towards an African Literature. S.E.K. Mqhayi published an isibongo in 1912 entitled ‘U-Nongqause’, and H.I.E. Dhlomo wrote a play called The Girl Who Killed to Save, which was published in 1935. During apartheid, J.J.R. Jolobe published a poem titled ‘Ingqawule’ in his collection Ilitha in 1959, and D.L.P. Yali-Manisi orated his isibongo ‘Ingxaki eyasenzakalisayo’ in Jeff Opland’s car in 1970, which was subsequently published in Opland’s collection of Yali-Manisi’s work in 2015. These are to name but a few African intellectual interactions with the historical event.

Of all of these, only Gqoba’s text was freely available online during the hard lockdown, and this was only because it had been translated and published by Helen Bradford and Msokoli Qotole in the journal Kronos in 2008. It has also recently been digitised by the UCT Libraries’ Ibali platform, which has digitised all available editions of Isigidimi samaXosa (the isiXhosa-language newspaper for which Gqoba served as editor). The works of the other authors are much more difficult to get ahold of outside the physical library space and university, both of which were inaccessible for a long period during our hard lockdown.

All of this added to our motivation to find a way to make African intellectual interactions with the history of Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing accessible to people. In this, we hoped to counter the reproduction and dominance of Anglophone stories of the event and make visible the presence of African intellectuals in the historical discourse.

Transforming history

EMANDULO’s Cattle Killing will change over time as more people engage with the digital materials and contribute to discussion on the historical event. The project is not about having the final word on the topic or presenting a singular ‘grand narrative’ of the event. Rather, it is about facilitating engagements with a history open to reconsideration through discussion.

It is important for our future that thie discussion moves beyond domination by Anglophone histories and an extremely limited pool of sources. With more people accessing, reading, and listening to the works of African intellectuals, discussions on the history might take different shapes and traverse different routes. After all, the transformation of African historical discourses can only happen when African histories and sources are accessible.

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Himal Ramji is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town. He has helped produce a new presentation for the FHYA’s EMANDULO platform based on his PhD research on stories and histories of Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing. Of particular interest are the vernacular histories produced by African intellectuals which have largely been erased from public discussions concerning the event.