South Africa 1856 Xhosa Cattle Killing Prophecy of Nongqawuse
The Story of South Africa: Empire, Apartheid, and Transformation — Fexingo HistoryPlay episode
Show notes
In 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse returned from a riverbank near the Gxarha River with a prophecy: the ancestors would rise, drive the British into the sea, and restore the Xhosa kingdom. To make it happen, the Xhosa people must destroy their cattle and burn their grain. Over the next year, the prophecy spread like wildfire through the Eastern Cape. By early 1857, tens of thousands of cattle had been slaughtered, crops destroyed, and fields left fallow. The promised resurrection never came. Instead, famine swept the land. An estimated 40,000 Xhosa starved to death, and another 40,000 fled as refugees. The Xhosa lost their economic independence, their political autonomy, and much of their land to British colonial expansion. This episode explores the context of the Cattle Killing: the pressures of colonial encroachment, the recent lung sickness epidemic among cattle, the role of Nongqawuse and her uncle Mhlakaza, the divided responses among Xhosa chiefs like Sarhili and Phalo, and the aftermath that reshaped the Eastern Cape. Lucas and Luna discuss what drove an entire people to follow a prophecy of self-destruction, and how memory of the Cattle Killing continues to resonate in Xhosa oral tradition and South African history. #Xhosa #Nongqawuse #CattleKilling #EasternCape #SouthAfrica #ColonialHistory #Prophecy #Mhlakaza #Sarhili #BritishEmpire #Famine #OralTradition #AfricanHistory #1856 #1857 #LungSickness #KingWilliam'sTown #FexingoHistory Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo
