South Africa

The Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856–57 began in the visions of Nongqawuse, a girl of about fifteen who reported at the Gxarha River that the ancestors would return, drive out the British, and restore the herds — on condition that the existing cattle be slaughtered and the fields left unsown. Her uncle Mhlakaza carried the message to the paramount chief Sarhili, who accepted it. Over the following months a substantial part of Xhosaland killed its animals and stopped planting.

The material setting matters as much as the vision. Lungsickness, introduced with imported Friesland cattle in 1853, was already destroying the herds; the Cape administration under Sir George Grey was pressing hard on Xhosa land and labour. Helen Bradford has argued that the command to kill was partly a sanitary response to an epidemic already under way, recast as prophecy. Jeff Peires reads it as a coherent millenarian answer to conquest: if the world was ending anyway, the ancestors' terms were worth meeting.

The promised day was fixed, then refixed, and passed. Roughly forty thousand people died in the famine; a comparable number left for the Colony as labourers, and the depopulated territory was opened to white settlement. This is the point at which the case parts company with the Millerites or the Jehovah's Witnesses. Those movements survived their failed dates by reinterpreting them. Here the act of belief was itself the catastrophe, and there was no community left intact to do the reinterpreting.

The narrative is told in the Cattle-Killing myth; the tradition and its prophetic vocabulary in The Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1856–57); the argument about what actually happened in the essay on it. What the Xhosa case supplies to the comparative record is a rare control: an eschatology whose consequences can be counted, against remnant promises that cost their believers nothing but a date.