Promised Land. Karl Kemp
zone, or British Kaffraria. Her parents died during the Eighth Frontier War of 1850. She was born into ‘the heart of redness’, as author Zakes Mda put it, in a land awash with mysticism and prophecy. There were many famed seers of the time, including Nxele, Mlanjeni, Nontetha and Enoch Mgijima, all of whom were hugely influential in Xhosa politics, war and relations with the colonists.
One day, Nongqawuse and a younger friend strolled down to the river-mouth near their village on the coast to scare birds from her uncle’s crops when two strangers appeared to her in a vision, whispering in a whistling voice that only the privileged could hear – a sound called imilozi.
They told Nongqawuse that the spirits of the Xhosa ancestors would sweep the British into the sea if the Xhosa did as the spirits commanded and brought their own nation to its knees first; the cattle they possessed, they said, had been contaminated by witches. They must slaughter the cattle, turn from witchcraft, and start constructing great grain pits and cattle enclosures. Doing so would lay the ground for a rebirth, and the cattle they slaughtered would be born again stronger and bigger, and the crops and harvests would be so great as to fill all the new pits and more.
When Nongqawuse returned and announced this, she was laughed out of the village. However, her uncle, having listened to the story, realised that one of the figures that had appeared was his brother, Nongqawuse’s deceased father. With his corroboration, the village people took the prophecy seriously.
Nongqawuse’s prophecy eventually came to the ears of the great Xhosa king in Xhosaland, Sarhili of the Gcaleka. Sarhili had some five years prior put dozens of witches to death in the Kei River, believing them to be responsible for the lung sickness that had ravaged the cattle of most of his chiefs and people, creating a deep depression. Around the same time, the British had suffered a grave defeat to the Russians in the Crimean War, and news of this spread quickly among the Xhosa. They believed that the Russians were a black nation, imbued with the spirits of dead Xhosa, and that prophets like Nxele and Mlanjeni were returning with the Russians from across the sea to vanquish the British at the tip of Africa as well.
This did not happen.
Caught up in the misery of the time, Sarhili was convinced by Nongqawuse’s prophecy, travelled to her home, and there also communed with the spirits. He became the most influential of believers, and from then on the killing and burning began in earnest. Like dominoes falling, the prophecy spread across the lands of the Gcaleka Xhosa. Most Xhosa did not destroy all they had, and many groups did not take part at all. The fullness of the destruction and killing ripened over a period of fifteen months.
Nongqawuse’s prophecy of riches and the destruction of the British by the spirits of the ancestors did not come to pass; new cattle did not arise from the mouths of the great rivers; God did not strike down the unfaithful and the wicked. Nongqawuse, her uncle and Sarhili responded that this was because the Xhosa had not killed sufficient cattle; if they had done so, new cattle would have materialised. Those who did not believe the prophecy, including a number of powerful chiefs who had prohibited their followers from joining in the slaughter, were blamed, as well as the fact that some cattle had been sold, not killed. These and other reasons for the failure of the prophecy were lapped up by desperate believers, many of whom were by now so economically destitute that they had little alternative than to preach the gospel in hopes of a great revival.
Sarhili made a second pilgrimage to the river-mouth, and stories soon spread that he had seen a number of boats filled with black brethren who told him that more were coming and that they should keep slaughtering cattle. New dates for the fulfilment of the prophecy were conjured by Nongqawuse, and the Xhosa ended up killing hundreds of thousands of their most highly prized possession, resulting in starvation, death, impoverishment, the decimation of the Xhosa population in the area from over 100 000 to 20 000, and a mass out-migration of Xhosa peoples to the Cape Colony.
The first-ever influx-control laws were promulgated by the Cape in order to deal with this situation. Most historians, and any visitor to the modern Eastern Cape, can agree that the Xhosa, despite dominating ANC party politics until 2009, have never recovered economically; nor did the Union or apartheid allow them a real chance to do so.
A century and a half later in the Land Claims Court, the descendants of the 1820 Settlers – the defendants – stated that the period after the cattle-killing was the first time the presence of black labourers coming to the commonage looking for work was recorded.
The Land Claims Court is special in that its standards are far looser than in an ordinary court of law. Evidentiary rules are flexible, allowing hearsay evidence and the testimony of anthropologists and historians in order to go about proving claims that are contingent on hundred-year-old facts.
To succeed with a land claim, a claimant has to lodge a claim setting out that they were part of a community that was dispossessed of a right in land due to a racially discriminatory practice or law after 19 June 1913 – the date the segregationist Natives Land Act was passed. If found to be valid, the claim must then be processed and gazetted. A land claim only comes to court if there is an individual or group residing on the land under claim – in other words, where a dispute regarding the historical and legal validity of the claim arises.
The Salem Commonage was such a case, and it could hardly have been more symbolic: Xhosa labourers claiming against a group of white landowners descended from one of the few groups of Europeans expressly ordered by a foreign power to colonise South African land. It is not for no reason that celebrated South African writer J.M. Coetzee set his controversial novel Disgrace, about deep-rooted conflict over land entitlement, in Salem.
Two eminent historians diametrically opposed in ideology, and both revisionists in their own way, came to dominate the case. Martin Legassick, on behalf of the claimants and their lawyers, was a well-known Marxist historian, and something of a celebrity in ‘radical’ history circles. He is credited with realigning the story of colonial South Africa away from imperialist conquest and to one of global capital exploiting the mineral wealth discovered in the second part of the nineteenth century. Legassick had been an active and engaged member of a Marxist group within the ANC in the 1980s, but was temporarily banned from the liberation movement for stoking factionalism. In later years, he turned on the party completely for its perceived shift to neoliberal policies and failure to emancipate the working class. In 2009, he was arrested for his support of a land occupation in Cape Town, and prior to that was involved in a much-publicised open-letter exchange with housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu regarding the eviction of squatters in the Cape Flats.
For the defendants was Hermann Giliomee, the pre-eminent scholar of Afrikaner history in the world. Giliomee is from the old guard; his family had been part of the Afrikaner elite during apartheid, although he had been a pragmatist reformer. In July 1987, he attended the famed Dakar Conference between the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa (IDASA), led by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, and members of the ANC, represented by Thabo Mbeki. In later years, Giliomee worked ardently for the preservation of Afrikaans as a language of tuition at his first alma mater, Stellenbosch University.
Both professors were held in great esteem in their profession. Both were officially ‘retired’. Both had specialised expertise in the colonial South African history on which this case turned, namely frontier zones. Giliomee had written a thesis on the Zuurveld as the country’s first frontier; Legassick had written a PhD on the Griqua/Sotho-Tswana frontier to the north. Seeing two historians square off in court was an unusual sight. Their roles in court were never intended to take centre stage; being expert witnesses, they were only there to assist the court in making findings of fact, but the press painted it as a sporting event – a Rumble in the Jungle for the soul of the country. ‘Leading Historians Fight Over Land Claim’, read the headlines.
Giliomee and Legassick testified for fifteen days, spread over six months, led in examination and were cross-examined in turn by advocates. The court papers and records eventually numbered over 5 000 pages, spread over fifty ring binders and three different courts.
What it boiled down to was two competing versions of the history of the land at stake. The claimants’ case was that a community of families had resided on the entirety of the vast commonage since the 1800s (though this averment had not been part of their original