Even before this eventful week, the handwringing was getting more palpable. Announcing one’s return to traditional religion has become almost commonplace.  ‘Where will this lead…?’ or ‘How could it have come to this…?’ But when things are entangled, we can’t really say whether an election or some other event will deliver good or bad, ultimately. In the same vein, we can’t really pin the blame on anything. Systemic entanglement is not a new thing. If we paid more attention to the past, we would know more about it.

Africa’s longest defence against colonialism was fought by the Eastern Cape Xhosa against the British Empire. Despite vastly inferior war tech, they resisted the British for 100 years in a series of brutal frontier wars that ended in the late 1800s.

A young Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse was orphaned during the Eighth Frontier War, and went to live with her uncle Mhlakaza, a diviner. When she was 15, she and a friend went to chase birds from the crops, and claimed to see the spirits of the ancestors. Returning home, Nongqawuse told her uncle what the spirits had told her.

To win the war, the people should destroy all their crops and slaughter every head of cattle (the source of wealth as well as food). In return, the spirits promised to sweep the European settlers into the sea. Granaries would be replenished, and the cattle would be replaced with healthier herds.

For her uncle, just enough of her story rung true. The cattle were plagued by a lung disease that had arrived with the European livestock. He took the prophecy to the Xhosa king, who issued a command. A millenarian movement erupted across the nation and in a frenzy 400,000 head of cattle were slaughtered and acres of crops were burnt.

Tens of thousands starved or were felled by disease that emanated from the rotting carcasses. By 1879, the long-running resistance to British rule collapsed and the British colonial authorities expropriated Xhosa land.

Every South African child is told the tragic story of Nongqawuse. Some say it shows the danger of primitive beliefs in prophecies or the idea that we can foretell the future.

But the deeper lessons lie between the lines. They lie in the fact that 100 years of colonial war had deeply disrupted Xhosa society, including cultural practices that were seen to bring a return to ‘order’. When disruption becomes systemic, blame flies every which way.

• For more than a year, the failure of Nongqawuse’s prophecy was blamed on those who resisted the call, dubbed the amagogotya (‘those who refused to believe or obey a prophet’).
• Oral traditions attributed blame to Nongqawuse herself.
• Feminist historians blamed her uncle and the chief for taking her visions out of context.
• The liberals blamed backward thinking, and offered Nongqawuse shelter.
• The Marxists saw it as a plot by British colonial governor and arch-tactician Sir George Grey to manipulate the situation.
• Writing in 1888, Gqoba, a linguist with a vernacular understanding of the era, blamed the Christian influence on Nongqawuse’s uncle.
• Nongqawuse herself had equated Governor Grey with Satan.

In their paper on Nongqawuse, economic historians Helen Bradford and Msokoli Qotole acknowledge the futility of blame in the context of a peasant world view disintegrating in the face of a capitalising colonial order.

More than a century on, does something feel familiar? When disruption becomes systemic, it is no longer possible to ascertain root cause; and we can assume very little about what will happen next. Things have moved beyond the known order and nonlinear dynamics take centre stage.

When spirits wake up, deeper patterns are in play.

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Source: Helen Bradford and Msokoli Qotole. 2008. Ingxoxo enkulu ngoNongqawuse (a great debate about Nongqawuse’s era). Kronos vol.34 n.1 Cape Town Nov. 2008.

Image of Nongqawuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse