TAMMY FRAY
Nongqawuse and the great cattle killing of 1856-57 have been the subject of endless fascination for almost two centuries.
The historic event has been employed as a vehicle that writers and thinkers have been using for years to try to make sense of the inexplicable circumstances in the contemporary.
At any given time, the cattle killing is held up as an example of either generational irresponsibility or cultural revolution. Nongqawuse is cast as either a deceptive Jezebel or a pioneering African Joan of Arc.
In Treive Nicholas’s hands, Nongqawuse and the cattle killing become his personal pilgrimage, transmuted into a new book, In Search of Nongqawuse, which lays bare the bloodied mess the colonial project wrought on the amaXhosa resulting in reverberations the Eastern Cape continues to feel today.
The book is split over several chapters that traces Nicholas’s discovery of the story of Nongqawuse and his subsequent travels across the Eastern Cape before concluding back in the UK. This physical journey mirrors the intellectual and spiritual arc of Nicholas’s progression from incredulous voyeur of black history to an impassioned ally in the fight towards reclaiming Nongqawuse’s name from the annals of shame.
Nicholas’s pilgrimage encompasses sites charged with the potency of the cattle killing’s history including the place that marks the spot on which amaXhosa King Hintsa was killed at the hands of British colonial authorities.
The book’s thesis rests on Nicholas’s belief that the violent and barbaric murder of Hintsa set the stage for the subsequent cattle killing and the deaths through starvation of 40,000 amaXhosa that followed. The journey ends ultimately with Nicholas staring at the moss riddled headstone of one of the British empire’s most heralded figures, who through the murder and mutilation of Hintsa is the personification of the legacy of colonialism. Through this book, readers ultimately trace Nicholas’s route to a personal reconciliation with the complexity of his own complicated cultural heritage as a British man.
In the silences between the pages, we hear a quiet lament from Nicholas; “What does it mean, in the 21st century to be descended from a nation with such a vast legacy of violence and destruction?”
Cultural authenticity has been a heated debate in literature for decades and is often wrongly reduced to the question of whether or not white people are allowed to write about cultures outside of their own. This question is viewed by some as a censorship placed on authorial freedoms while others believe that it is important for authors to be aware of the pernicious ways in which their writing across cultures can reify existing stereotypes.
What Nicholas has achieved with this book rests on his understanding of the limitations of his positionality.
This book’s crowning achievement is humility from the author where white writers before have used their cultural hegemony and unacknowledged privilege to reduce people from different cultures into caricatures.
The East London launch of In search of Nongqawuse on May 10 at the EL Museum saw amaXhosa attendees confess to Nicholas their initial skepticism of the book as in the past, black South Africans have seen themselves hideously ‘othered’ on the page through the colonial gaze. Based on this, it was with great hesitancy that I approached the book. Nicholas was initially drawn to Nongqawuse’s story out of a sense of outrage that a girl of her age could be held responsible for centuries for the fatal demise of the amaXhosa.
It is during his quest for answers that he makes various physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual journeys that leave him changed and it is this narrative arc towards self-improvement that breaks away from the vampiric nature of other books by white writers.
It was clear from the East London book launch that among amaXhosa there are closely felt ‘deep truths’ about the cattle killing that generations of amaXhosa have kept among themselves, knowing that white hegemonic culture would superimpose its own reductive version of the story — a version that has perpetuated the impression of amaXhosa as stupid and self-defeating. If Nicholas had definitively placed a stamp on what he believes caused the cattle killing, this would have been a betrayal of the limitations of his positionality where cultural authenticity is concerned, especially as Nicholas’s book stands on the shoulders of previous works about this topic from amaXhosa writers and scholars who were not able to publish or profit from their work.
What is obvious to me is that the book is not for the amaXhosa, who have evidently distrusted the historical account of this story from the beginning but instead the book seems to be written for people from within Nicholas’s social and cultural context who by Nicholas’s own admission, remain unaware of the great harm the British empire caused in SA and globally. In speaking to an audience of readers who resemble him, he does not presume to tell amaXhosa what they should believe and feel about their history which is the books greatest strength. In this work, Nongqawuse is not really delivered to us in the complexity of her personhood but instead she becomes a symbol through which Nicholas unlearns and expands his world view. Nongqawuse is the face of the book but its moral centre is Nicholas himself as the book takes us on his rediscovery of the vastness of realities outside of his own culture.
This book brings the cattle killing back into public consciousness in the contemporary for discussion and debate and hopefully, finally opens the doors for readers to look deep enough into the subject to stumble on the work of amaXhosa scholars who explored this issue years before without any acclaim or the opportunity to see their name on a book cover.
The book is available for purchase at Bargain Books.
