Nongqawuse

Nongqawuse (right)

Nongqawuse (* 1841 ; † 1898 ) was a prophetess from the Xhosa people in what is now South Africa . Their predictions sparked the Xhosa cattle killing , which killed up to 50,000 people as a result of the famine it caused.

Life

Nongqawuse was born in 1841 near the Gxarha River in independent Xhosaland, near the border of British Kaffraria in the Eastern Cape , colonized in 1835 . Little is known about her early life. She is said to have been an orphan whose parents died fighting with Europeans. The orphaned Nongqawuse was raised by her uncle Mhlakaza , who was the son of a councilor of the tribal leader. Mhlakaza was a religious man who left Xhosaland after his mother's death and lived for a time in the Cape Colony where he came into contact with Christianity . He returned to Xhosaland in 1853. As the interpreter and translator of her visions, Mhlakazi was to have a significant influence on Nongqawuse's life.

In 1856, at the age of 15, Nongqawuse claimed to have seen three ghosts by a pond. They told her that the Xhosa had to kill all of their cattle and destroy their crops, as they would be bewitched. The annihilation would result in the spirits of the dead of the Xhosa being resurrected and driving the Europeans from their land. When that happened, vast numbers of much nicer cattle would emerge from the earth, while large fields of grain, ripe and ready for harvest, would suddenly appear. Problems and illnesses should also go away and all would be given youth and beauty. Nongqawuse reported her vision to Mhlakaza, who then notified the tribe's royal officials. Since the cattle of the tribe were already weakened by disease, the Xhosa accepted the message after initial skepticism.

Historians estimate that the Xhosa then killed between 300,000 and 400,000 cattle. Not all of the Xhosa believed Nongqawuse's prophecies. A small minority known as the Amagogotya (stingy) refused to slaughter and neglect their animals, and this refusal was used by Nongqawuse to denounce the failure of the prophecies over a period of fifteen months (April 1856 to June 1857) to explain. Nongqawuse predicted that the ancestral promise would be fulfilled on February 18, 1857, when the sun turned red. After Nongqawuse's prophecy failed, her followers first blamed those who had not obeyed her instructions. However, they later turned against them and handed them over to the Europeans. She spent the rest of her life on a farm near Alexandria (Eastern Cape) and died in 1898.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nongqawuse - The Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856 - Xhosa Culture. Retrieved November 20, 2019 (American English). 
2. ↑ Jeffrey B. Peires: The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-killing Movement of 1856-7 . Indiana University Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-253-20524-7 ( google.de [accessed November 20, 2019]).
3. ↑ Nongqawuse | South African History Online. Retrieved November 20, 2019 .