Between Nature and Culture: The Place of Prophecy in Zakes Mda's the Heart of Redness (Critical Essay‪)‬

In April 1856, the fifteen-year-old Xhosa girl Nongqawuse was hailed by two strangers near the mouth of the Gxarha River, a short distance beyond the colonial border that divided independent Xhosaland from British Kaffraria, and advised to communicate a message to the Xhosa people. Claiming to emanate from the ancestors, the message instructed the amaXhosa to renounce witchcraft, to slaughter their cattle and refrain from the cultivation of crops, and to build new grain pits, cattle enclosures and houses. In return, the ancestors would replenish Xhosa livestock and grain, and assist the amaXhosa in driving white settlers from land regarded by the amaXhosa as rightfully belonging to them. Nongqawuse's uncle, the diviner Mhlakaza, conveyed the message to King Sarhili, who directed his people to obey the instruction. Despite opposition from some chiefs and their followers, the message quickly gained popular support and the amaXhosa rapidly succumbed to millenarian longings. In the space of thirteen months, crops were razed and some 400 000 cattle butchered. Deliverance was set for 18 February 1857, when the sun would turn red and the prophecy be fulfilled. Nothing extraordinary happened on this or on succeeding days. An estimated 40 000 Xhosa died subsequently of starvation and a further 40 000 left their homes in search of food and employment in the Colony. In the wake of the disaster, much of the remaining land of independent Xhosaland was seized by the colonial government at the Cape and handed over to chiefs sympathetic to its rule, or sold off to white settlers. After more than a century of warfare on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, the amaXhosa had finally been pacified. In his seminal study The Dead Will Arise (1989), the historian Jeff Peires argues that the events around the cattle killing derive not from a single cause but from a convergence of conditions. Of crucial importance is the significance of cattle in traditional Xhosa society. Over and above their obvious economic value, they have symbolic significance in conferring social status, in demarcating gender relations, and in providing access to the sacred. This explains the far-reaching threat to Xhosa society of settler encroachment in lands historically held by the Xhosa, a threat exacerbated by the spread of lung-sickness from the Cape Colony into Xhosaland in the mid-1850s, decimating Xhosa herds of cattle and rendering the Xhosa even more vulnerable economically and socially. While the mass slaughter of cattle seems to contradict the value attached to them, the response is nevertheless explicable, says Peires, in terms of Xhosa belief systems centred on notions of contamination, sacrifice and renewal. According to the logic of this belief, the society had become contaminated by witchcraft, this contamination was evident in the wide-spread and mysterious death of Xhosa cattle, and the cattle had therefore to be sacrificed to purge society of impurity and to ensure social renewal. Of particular interest, explains Peires, is the way pagan belief in the regeneration of the earth through intercession of the ancestors had become intertwined, in the course of colonial contact, with Christian belief in the resurrection of the soul. This convergence of pagan and Christian thought is apparent also in the role accorded the prophet in ascertaining the causes of social disharmony and in prescribing appropriate remedies based on the principles of renunciation and sacrifice.