Peter Dickson
February 16 1857, said the teenage prophet, would be a day like no other. After the people had killed all their diseased cattle and left their crops to rot in sacrifice, the dead would rise. They would bring with them abundant cattle and food, drive the British into the sea, and herald the dawn of a golden new age.
Instead, more than 20 000 believers starved to death, thousands more were forced into migrant servitude for survival, and the British drove off the king and resettled the desolate wasteland left by his people.
Now, on the eve of the new millennium and still among Africa’s most impoverished people, the Xhosa royal council has told Britain’s Prince Charles it’s payback time.
In an extraordinary letter sent to Buckingham Palace, British high commissioner Dame Maeve Fort and South African Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and bearing the seal of Xhosa King Xolilizwe Sigcawu, the young bloods of the new royal council accuse the British of direct complicity in the Xhosa national suicide and of stripping a once proud nation of its dignity.
Says Nelson Mandela’s praise poet and Xhosa royal council chief executive officer Zolani Mkiva: “It is time. We cannot be submissive any longer, we love our nation too much. We want to start a new century afresh and put the evils of the past behind us.”
It was something tried by the Herero people of Namibia last year, without success. Visiting the former colony in March last year, German President Roman Herzog refused to apologise for the 1904 extermination order that crushed a Herero rebellion and decimated 75% of its people, saying that “too much time has passed for a formal apology to the Hereros to make sense”.
That attitude, Mkiva says, is why the council has chosen to address its letter to the heir to the British throne and not his mother Queen Elizabeth II. The titular head of the Commonwealth, he says, is symbolic of “the old guard and belongs to the old school of thought”. The prince of Wales, on the other hand, was “open- minded, embracing and broad and we would get a better hearing from him”.
South Africa is big business for Britain, still the country’s biggest trading partner, and millions of pounds have been poured into development and education projects in the Eastern Cape, home of the Xhosa.
And the history books argue that Britain’s colonial governor, Sir George Grey, did not sow the seeds of the cataclysm, but merely capitalised on the result of lonely 15-year-old Nongqawuse’s catastrophic prophecy that induced the great Transkei cattle killing from 1856 to 1857.
The University of Cape Town’s Professor Christopher Saunders, Unisa’s Nicholas Southey and leading Xhosa historian and former Rhodes University academic and African National Congress MP Dr Jeff Peires argue that the cattle killing is “best understood as a millenarian response to the process of colonisation which had been eating into the fabric of Xhosa society nnfor decades”.
nPrince nnnCharles may well ask what on earth possessed an outwardly sane and rational people to swallow a teenage ghost story and act on it en masse, but as evidenced in the witch killings that continue, unshakable belief in the powers of the supernatural was as deeply embedded in Xhosa tradition in the mid-19th century as it is in much of the Eastern Cape today.
“Grey was part and parcel of the dirty tricks of that time. He used that girl in an exercise to help the system and he was part of the orchestration, an agent of the regime to disorganise and disintegrate the house of the Xhosa,” Mkiva argues.
“If the British make an issue of this and say it was too long ago, then they have lost their minds,” Mkiva says. The council’s letter is seeking a meeting with Prince Charles to begin the process of reconciliation and which could result in “alleviating economic issues facing the Eastern Cape”.
“We are not necessarily seeking reparations, but we are open to proposals,” Mkiva explains. “We will ask the British to do what they can in showing their remorse by uplifting the needs of our people. They became very rich through colonialism in Africa, and if they are human enough and can still see that it was brutal and gross, they will be able to apologise. It is not just lip service we’re looking for – we cannot be submissive anymore. We will leave no stone unturned in meeting the needs of our people.”
During British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s official visit to South Africa earlier this year, there was no response to what Mkiva calls a “disorganised” royal appeal for an apology to the Xhosa nation. What, then, if Prince Charles agrees with the historians and absolves Sir George Grey of manipulating Nongqawuse?
“That,” says Xhosa heir to the throne Prince Xhanti Sigcawu with a steely glint in his eye that would make his warrior ancestors proud, “won’t be a problem”.