Jeff Peires Reprises 'The Dead Will Arise' for History in Public Life
Cynthia Kros
Dr Kros is an honorary research associate based in the APC and has been involved in developing and teaching on the History in Public Life Course offered as the core course of the MA by coursework in History at UCT.
We invited well-known historian Jeff Peires to address students in the History in Public Life MA course on the 7th of April this year. Members of History Access and the APC joined us in a hybrid class with Prof Peires himself speaking to us via Zoom about the cattle-killing movement of the mid-nineteenth century. The seminar was eagerly anticipated and attendance was high. Peires is the author of The Dead will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing 1856-7. It was first published by outlier Ravan Press in 1989 and, some years after the demise of Ravan, the ‘child of a special time’ and, ultimately the victim of a shrinking donor pool, as the Mail and Guardian (1996) would have it, was republished by Jonathan Ball (2003).
There is still no book-length narrative of the cattle-killing movement besides Peires’s book and, despite some of the criticisms that have been made of it, it will undoubtedly retain its status as the first sustained exploration of the cattle-killing archive. As Peires explains in the 2003 edition, his archiving endeavours took him to three main collections: the Grey-Maclean correspondence (between Governor Sir George Grey and his subordinate in British Kaffraria Colonel John Maclean in the Cape Archives); the work of poet, philologist and journalist WW Gqoba, especially Gqoba’s series of interviews with ‘believers’, Isizatu Sokuxelwa kwe nkomo ngo Nongqause (The reason for the killing of cattle by Nongqawuse – Peires’s translation); and the Cape Journals of Archdeacon NJ Merriman (important for Peires’s argument that Nongqawuse’s uncle Mhlakaza who communicated with the chiefs concerning her visions and gave them legitimacy was the same person as the Archdeacon’s servant — a Christian convert who went by the name of Wilhelm Goliath.)
The History in Public Life course is attuned to the ways in which history enters popular discourses in various forms and how it is deployed, received and reshaped. One of the course’s guiding texts since its inception has recently been published as a chapter in Babel Unbound: Rage, reason and rethinking public life edited by Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton (2020). In Chapter 2 of this groundbreaking book, authors Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory Bester develop concepts such as circulation and ‘take up’ to illuminate the sometimes convoluted and often unpredictable paths taken by public discourses in relation to productions in the public domain. For the purposes of this article, Modisane’s notion of ‘public critical potency’ seems particularly pertinent. At the end of 2021, one hundred and sixty something years after the cattle-killing movement failed to produce the longed-for apocalypse, minister of mineral resources and energy Gwede Mantashe offered an extraordinary rebuke to opponents of Shell’s proposed seismic survey for oil off the Wild Coast, which drew on the cautionary tale of prophetess Nongqawuse and those who had killed their cattle in obedience to the shades that appeared in her visions.
According to a report in the Sowetan, Mantashe said: ‘If the Eastern Cape remains that way, that we don’t develop, this is our second Nongqawuse’ and: ‘Here all of us, we are victims of a prophecy that said we must kill our cattle and we will be wealthy. How are you going to be wealthy when you have killed the cattle?’ (quoted in Deklerk 2021). One could hardly expect to find a better illustration of ‘public critical potency’ than this. Mantashe must have reckoned on hitting precisely the raw nerve that Peires himself identified in the preface to the republished version of The Dead Will Arise (2003): ‘The great cattle-killing movement remains an open sore in the historical consciousness of most South Africans.’
Mantashe, who is 66 years old and was born in what was then the Transkei, almost certainly learned at school about the cattle-killing movement, which was meant in the context of the apartheid curriculum to demonstrate that, left to their own devices black people could be extremely gullible and foolish and, furthermore that whatever destruction had been wreaked on amaXhosa was their own fault. The cattle-killing is still featured in the latest version of the school curriculum, although now evidently textbooks look to Peires’s work for source material rather than offering sensationalist accounts of the ‘National Suicide’ as it used to be framed.
It was precisely Peires’s brilliantly documented and compellingly told The Dead Will Arise, that provided or should have provided the means for a complete rupture with the idea that the prophecy and its catastrophic aftermath were to be explained simply by invoking what the anthropologist and historian John Henderson Soga, son of Tiyo, described as the cattle-killing ‘delusion.’ The younger Soga, whose father had been traumatised by his encounters with starving amaXhosa on their way to seek relief while setting up his mission station, declared the event to be ‘a supreme instance of the folly of superstition’ (Soga 2013, 121). It was the impression Mantashe, undoubtedly wished to convey in relation to environmentalists who cleaved to romantic notions of the natural environment instead of embracing ‘development.’
Peires’ account, which he described at the seminar as broadly Marxist in orientation, dealt at length with the British colonists’ seizure and redistribution of land, the brutality of the warfare they had long waged against amaXhosa, and their increasing determination to exercise direct rule over them. It was an analysis in which Peires, by his own telling at the seminar, effectively laid the blame squarely at the feet of the colonists, more particularly, Governor of the Cape Colony Sir George Grey — which is the line he took, after all ,in The Dead will Arise. Then Peires had observed that, even if the common attribution of culpability for the cattle-killing offered by amaXhosa to the effect that Grey had done it was not literally true, there was a sense in which it did encapsulate a larger truth. In the first place, the Governor had been part of a system that drove the ‘believers’ in Nongqawuse’s visions to resort to desperate measures. Once the promised resurrection had failed to materialise, Peires sought to show how Grey mercilessly capitalised on the mass starvation that followed so as to accelerate the programme of conquest.
In this scenario, perhaps the prophetess Nongqawuse whose name Mantashe hoped to conjure with, is given only a secondary role despite her appearance in the title of Peires’s book. Historian Helen Bradford (2004) addressed what she observed was an out of focus rendition of Nongqawuse in the secondary literature and also argued for a closer reading of the critique of contemporary tendencies in Xhosa society itself contained in the prophecies (see, for example, Bradford 2008 and Bradford and Qotole 2008). Peires had volunteered to respond to Bradford’s criticisms of his account, explaining in the seminar that she was viewing the cattle-killing movement through a feminist lens, which he wished to dispute. Participants in the seminar probably shared Peires’s own view that it was a pity that Bradford could not be in the room to answer to his critique.
Peires had insisted prior to the seminar that all participants read Qoba (2015) for a reliable account of the cattle-killing movement. It is to be hoped that the APC’s EMANDULO site will facilitate new work and closer engagement with the work of other black writers and intellectuals as well and that Nongqawuse-shaming tactics like those of Mantashe and the possibility that they will work on any constituency are rendered null and void. The great isiXhosa Poet SEK Mqhayi, implying that local familiarity with the story of Nongqawuse bred contempt, castigated those who, without regard for the truth of the matter appropriated her name for the object of their own hatreds or destructive purposes (See quotation from Mqhayi 1912 in isiXhosa EMANDULO 2022).
(With thanks to Himal Ramji for the Mqhayi quote and for a useful conversation and also to Alan Mabin)