Millenarianism and Resistance
Among the Xhosa, 1779-1880:
An Essay in Cultural Explication
Robert André LaFleur
Department of Sociology/Anthropology
I
Ecology & Political Structure in Xhosaland
The Xhosa are a subgroup of the broader linguistic entity known as the Nguni-speaking peoples of Southern Africa. Often called the “Cape Nguni,” the Xhosa were among the first Africans to come into contact with Afrikaner trekkers. Before the twentieth century, the Xhosa were semi-nomadic cattle herders; their society was organized along the lines of a segmentary lineage system.[1] A large portion of their resources came from the soil in the form of maize and other crops. Other major economic activities for the Xhosa were hunting and fishing. Yet the Xhosa perceived themselves as, above all else, pastoralists, and in this they share the “pastoral mentality” common to many African cultures.
Cattle were their life. They provided milk, from which dairy products were made. Their skins and bones were essential to the material culture of the Xhosa. But above the infrastructural level, cattle played an important role as well. Loabola, or bridewealth, in which cattle were given as dowries, was an essential element in the kinship system. The role of cattle in sacrificial ritual was also important. The picture that emerges is one in which cattle were not limited to the “material” sphere of Xhosa life, but were involved in every facet of social structure and traditional thought.
The term “Xhosa” represented the highest conceptual level—that of the tribe—in a series of relatively autonomous chiefdoms numbering between 5,000 and 35,000 people. Tribal segments and sub-segments had many characteristics of the tribe itself. Each had its own distinctive name, a common identity, and its unique territory. The leadership of these units were conceived in terms of ritual authority; secular and supernatural power were inextricably linked.
Studies of nineteenth century Nguni political economy have stressed the importance of wives, land, livestock, and clients in the accumulation of political power. The path to religious influence was much the same. The power and substance of authority in Xhosa leadership had its roots in the extended kinship system. There were political advantages inherent in polygynous marriage. Moreover, the number of clients and supporters that a chief could control depended, to a large extent, on his success at incorporating as many clans as possible into his sphere of influence through marriage. In exchange for loyalty and service, the clans received loabola. Among the rights of the clients were the adjudication of legal disputes and the material bounty of cattle. Thus, a system of mutual reciprocity characterized the relationship between Xhosa chiefs and their client clans.
II
Early Contact Between Dutch and Khoisan
In the century between the Dutch East India Company’s settlement at the Cape in 1652 and the mid-eighteenth century, contact between Dutch and Khoisan peoples was sporadic. The company government attempted to isolate itself from the people of the interior, but complete isolation was impossible. Since the Dutch landing, Khoisan “mailmen” acted as intermediaries between the Cape community and the frontier of southern Africa. Africans served their white “chiefs” as guides, hunters, and agriculturalists. Even in the earliest stages of Dutch settlement, a distinct pattern of patron-client relationships—similar to those indigenous to the Xhosa—arose in response to the mutual political and economic needs of the two groups.
Two aspects of this early relationship would shape later conflict between the Dutch and Khoisan. To begin, the Dutch population at the Cape had a seemingly insatiable desire for beef. Though the Dutch East India Company government followed a policy of autonomy from the native population, there was no reliable method of securing red meat for the Western population.
But cattle, to the Khoisan, were far more than mere commodities; the Western desire for mere consumption of cattle was entirely foreign to them. Far from perceiving cattle as an important aspect of every facet of life, the white man sought only to slaughter and consume cattle. Cattle raids on both sides—increasing steadily through the eighteenth century—became a first stage in the conflict between whites and blacks in South Africa.
Both Xhosa and Boer cultures were quite similar materially. Far from the urban centers of eighteenth century Europe, Western settlers on the Cape led a frontier existence. Each group perceived the other as radically different from—perhaps the antithesis of—its own society and culture. And they were different—each had fundamentally different gods and ideas of the supernatural, social organizations, economic systems, and histories. But with both groups essentially in competition for the same resources, conflicts on the veld—low-lying rural spaces—escalated quickly over the next century.
Moreover, population pressures at the Cape led the Dutch East India Company to grant farming privileges to nine “free burghers” in 1657. It is at this point, only five years after the landing in southern Africa, that the Company compromised its vow of autonomy. These nine “free burghers” were the predecessors of the voortrekkers—“those who trek ahead,”—who would follow almost two hundred years later.
The increasing contact between white settlers and the indigenous African population led to a number of highly-charged social, political, and economic relationships. Intermarriage and miscegenation occurred on a wide scale in the first century of Dutch settlement. White settlers, even Capetown officials, contracted marriages with Zulu and Xhosa women in order to gain influence within the indigenous political and economic systems on the veld.
As the Afrikaners increased their consumption of land and cattle, however, this relationship of mutual interdependence turned to one of outright conflict. Demographic pressure lay behind the conflict: as the white population moved eastward, the Nguni were pushing westward. The African groups most similar to the society and economy of the Cape Dutch could no longer be accommodated within the existing system of small, autonomous chiefdoms.[2]
Nguni-speaking pastoralists were expanding at the expense of other African peoples, none of whom had sufficient economic, technological, or political resources to slow them. Clearly this was not a “natural” expansion—the result of population growth and the resultant pressure on natural resources. The Nguni expansion of the early eighteenth century owed much to the political, economic, and intellectual links between Afrikaner and African.
Given the rate of Nguni expansion, it is quite possible that their chiefdoms could have dominated both the eastern and western sections of the subcontinent. But the ambitions of the Afrikaners put an end to this; the source of Nguni power in relation to other, more remote, African peoples was their ultimate downfall.
The Afrikaners' movement eastward took place at an astounding speed. But unlike the Nguni expansion, the Afrikaner population did not increase as remarkably as their “consumption” of land. Every man felt a God-given right to possess six thousand acres of land—called a “hide” by trekkers. Ivory and animal skins culled from white hunting expeditions were immediate sources of income for Afrikaners and, equipped with guns and stabbing spears called assegais, they scoured the South African frontier for game. The consequences of this expansion manifested themselves quickly: by the turn of the century many indigenous species were endangered. The Afrikaners, during their long push eastward, were armed with those elements they felt raised them—materially and spiritually—above the indigenous Africans. The wheel, horses, guns, and the Bible were the essential reasons the Afrikaners could advance the South African frontier at phenomenal rates.
Economic well-being on both sides hinged upon a policy of peace. Especially for the Dutch Afrikaners, the movement of firearms, cattle, trade goods, and labor depended on safe trade routes. However, as demographic and economic pressures increased, each group required more land; the early contacts between the Nguni “advanced guard” and the Afrikaners gave way to more intense conflicts between organized militia.
By the late eighteenth century outright warfare became inevitable, and the first of the great Kaffir Wars broke out in 1779. During the first and second Kaffir Wars, the latter in 1793, the conflict became far more intense than in previous battles, and scattered cattle-raiding gave way to pitched battles and armed resistance. In spite of their advanced military technology, however, the Boers never achieved lasting control over the Xhosa in these wars. The far superior Xhosa numbers were sufficient to counteract the Afrikaners’s technological superiority. Indeed, the Xhosa actually could be said to have “won” the first three encounters.
But in 1806 a crucial change took place at the Cape. The Dutch lost control of southern Africa to the British. A growing international industrial power, the British government, was prepared to do something the Dutch never accomplished: advance the white settlements with the military force of the state. In 1811 the British government at the Cape decided to expel all Xhosa living west of the Fish River. The war which followed—the fourth of the Kaffir Wars—was of unprecedented intensity.
Total war was a foreign and entirely shattering experience for the Xhosa. Traditional African warfare was based on a fundamentally different premise than those fought in nineteenth century Europe. The purpose of warfare in traditional Xhosa society was to assimilate the defeated into the society or realm of influence of the victor, not destroy the social and economic base of the society by burning crops, destroying cattle, and executing males. Instead of being subjected to the victors and incorporated into their society—an extremely difficult process itself, but one that was understood—the Xhosa were rejected and expelled from their land. No longer on roughly equal terms, militarily and economically, with the aggressors, the Xhosa found themselves in the unfamiliar position of total defeat.
III
Nxele and the Xhosa Resistance to Western Culture
Many authors who deal with Christian thought in South Africa have failed to recognize the importance of the period between the fourth and eighth Kaffir Wars—1811-1853. At this time, Christian and African value systems came into conflict at the most basic level. In the mid-nineteenth century, no fewer than three major prophetic movements occurred among the Xhosa alone. All of the movements had one common, underlying theme: the Western intrusion into Xhosaland was as much an intellectual problem as a military one, and no adequate resistance to Western aggression could be developed without re-evaluating basic conceptions of Xhosa life and thought.
The power of Xhosa prophets—Nxele, Mlanjeni, and Nongquase—lay not so much in the supernatural powers they claimed, but rather in their ability to provide acceptable answers to the most profound questions of their time, namely “Who are these white people?;” “What do they want?;” and, most importantly, “How do we get rid of them?” This was the basic theme upon which the Xhosa resistance was based.
Total war with the British created a set of problems which the Xhosa were unable to solve by traditional methods. Most importantly, the authority of their chiefs was severely weakened. In many societies across sub-Saharan Africa—Tiv, Nuer, and Xhosa—political and ritual leadership were manifested in non-traditional forms during times of crisis (FN). Among the Xhosa, prophets were able to exercise power by linking themselves to hereditary chiefs.
By allying himself by marriage to the chief of the Ndlembe, Nxele, a commoner, was able to develop a strong following. He became well-known among neighboring chiefdoms for his ability to “turn white bullets into water” (FN). Nxele’s peculiar appeal, however, rested in his ability to create satisfying solutions in time of crisis by synthesizing elements of Xhosa traditional thought with Christian faith.
Nxele had mystical experiences which Western psychologists might call hysteria, but which Xhosa regarded as supernatural influence. Signs of these experiences included dreams and visions. Though many Xhosa had ecstatic experiences, relatively few initiated persons practiced divination. The implications of this are important. It was not religious experience alone that qualified a Xhosa to be a diviner; the initiate had to be recognized as such by established diviners, and his subsequent performances had to conform to the needs and expectations of his public. The diviner did not “lead” his followers to prophetic truth, but rather created a meaningful dialogue between religious thought and everyday experience. The realm of the sacred became, for a brief period, an integral part of life.[3]
It is impossible to understand the Xhosa intellectual response to Western aggression without an understanding of what “religion” means in an African context. In African traditional culture, people’s religion is embedded in all that is around them, the very culture in which they live. Traditional religions are preeminently social; they exist not for the individual as much as for the community of which the individual is a part. The Africanist John Mbiti writes:
To be human is to belong to the whole community, and to do so involves the participation in the beliefs, ceremonies, rituals, and festivals of that community. A person cannot detach himself from the religion of his group, for to do so is to be severed from his roots, his foundation, his context of security, his kinships, and the entire group of those who make him aware of his own existence. Therefore, to be without religion in African society amounts to a self- excommunication from the entire life of society; African societies do not know how to exist without religion.[4]
Religion, in addition to its metaphysical role, can contribute to the political development of society, since the spheres of sacred and secular are intertwined. The central problem the Xhosa faced originated from the effects of European colonialism. Nxele was both a Xhosa nationalist and a religious prophet; the two “functions”—one sacred, one secular—were inseparable.
Traditional Xhosa cosmology had no place for Europeans and the threat they imposed upon Xhosa ideas about the universe. The solution to the immediate problem of European intrusion was syncretic; Nxele relied on a set of Christian concepts introduced by European missionaries a century earlier and merged them with traditional Xhosa beliefs.
The Christian ideas most readily absorbed by the Xhosa were those concerning God, the Creation, and the Resurrection. It was the latter which had the greatest impact upon Xhosa thought, since it provided plausible answers to several important aspects of Xhosa belief. Among the Xhosa, as well as several other African societies, there existed no commonly accepted explanation for death. Like the Azande, whom the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard described in his classic ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, death was regarded as a product of sorcery—the ultimate impurity. So great was this fear among the Azande that the fatally ill were sometimes chased into the bush, while relatives of the deceased submitted to ritual purification. The Christian message that the dead did not really die, but rose again, was received enthusiastically by the Xhosa, and found its way into subsequent Xhosa ancestor cults.
The Xhosa language, moreover, had no definite future tense. Indo-European languages provide a several methods of expressing future time, but Xhosa had only the vaguest notion of the indefinite future. John Mbiti writes:
Beyond a few months from now, African concepts of time are silent and indifferent. This means that the future is nearly non-existent as actual time, apart from the relatively short projection of the present up to two years hence.[5]
Time did not move “forward” toward a climactic future, a heavenly utopia, nor did it move toward a dystopian end of the world. Life was lived day to day, moon to moon, season to season, year to year.
Nowhere was anything resembling Christian messianic visions found in traditional Xhosa thought. But it was precisely this vision—a future millennium in which the ancestors would return to earth and end the domination of the white man—that the Xhosa adapted from Christian teachings. Thus millenarian prophecy, which would have been virtually impossible to implement in pre-colonial Xhosa society, became a part of Xhosa religion under the twin influences of European guns and Biblical teachings.
Although he was fascinated by the unusual power of the white man—a power he perceived in Christian terms—Nxele found it difficult to cooperate with the Christian missionaries at the Cape for long. At length, he became convinced that he could never be perceived as the equal of white Christians, and began to move away from his earlier mainstream Christian teachings. As a young man, Nxele was so impressed by the Christian doctrine of resurrection that he persuaded many Xhosa to bury their dead. It was from the traditional Christian education of his youth that Nxele strayed in later years. After years of proclaiming divine truth to the Xhosa as a servant of God, Nxele began to associate himself with this divinity—a quite common indigenous reaction to Western teachings during the colonial period.
In 1816 Nxele began calling himself the younger brother of Christ. Nxele’s “House of God” was truly syncretic, merging Christian religious concepts with Xhosa social structure. Nxele perceived Christ as an eldest son of a bulging patrilineage. Moreover, he reasoned that it was foolish to call Mary a virgin. Procreation was an essential part of life, he taught, and the way to worship God properly was to “dance and enjoy life so that black people would multiply and fill the earth.”[6]
Once outside the Christian mainstream, Nxele quickly began to move away from its dogma. He took three wives and accepted a diviner’s share of cattle, generally incorporating himself into the mainstream of Xhosa society. But political events in South Africa were drawing Nxele inexorably into direct conflict with the British. His popularity as a prophet increased as he took stances more in line with Xhosa nationalistic ideals. He began to teach that the world was a battleground between Tixo, the god of the whites, and Mdalidipu, the god of the blacks. This dichotomized conceptual universe reflected the conflict at all levels between Xhosa and European cultures.
As a prophet, Nxele gained great influence among his people, but his ambitions were both political and religious. The Western differentiation between political and religious action as “realistic” and “idealistic” was quite foreign to the Xhosa. Nxele was able to fulfill a leadership role among the Xhosa by merging his religious influence with the secular power of a paramount chief. The prophet had to work within the confines of the formal power system, even though the chiefs’ “real” power had been severely weakened during the Kaffir Wars.
The Fifth Kaffir War (1818-1819) was the scene of Nxele’s greatest triumph as a messianic leader, as well as his ultimate defeat. In earlier wars with the Afrikaners, it was difficult to discern which party was the aggressor. Each side engaged in cattle raids and similar intrusions, until the conflicts widened into outright warfare. But in December of 1818, at the order of the British authorities at the Cape, British troops crossed the Fish River—hitherto the outermost boundary of the Cape province—into Xhosaland. After burning crops and huts they captured over 23,000 cattle before retreating. In reaction, Nxele, leading 10,000 Xhosa warriors armed with stabbing assegais, launched a daylight attack on Grahamstown. As they marched, Nxele’s army sang:
To chase the white men from the earth
And drive them to the sea.
The sea that cast them up at first
For AmaXhosa’s curse and bane
Howls for the progeny she nursed
To swallow them again.[7]
White men were commonly believed by the Xhosa to originate in the sea—an accurate observation, considering the shipping industry based at the Cape—and “driving the whites back into the sea” became a popular idea in the Xhosa resistance. But the physical confrontation was lopsided. Nxele’s spear-wielding warriors were slaughtered by white bullets. Nxele was captured and executed by British troops. After his death, his prophetic legend lived on, and Xhosa continued to wait for his millennial return for many years. Even today the Xhosa saying Kukuza kuka Nxele (“It is the coming of Nxele”) means “deferred hope.”[8]
Nxele’s ideas represented an adaptation to extreme foreign aggression within the traditional framework of Xhosa thought. His syncretism does not reflect a radical break with the past, however. Fusing Christian concepts of the millennium and traditional Xhosa political and social realities, Nxele formulated a new world-view capable of explaining—in a way meaningful to the Xhosa—the intrusion of Europeans onto the South African veld. Because of his ability to transcend Xhosa traditional beliefs and symbolize, through his syncretic theology of resistance, the Xhosa’s basic opposition to European aggression, Nxele and his teachings gained a lasting influence on Xhosa thought, even into the twentieth century.
IV
The Xhosa Cattle-Killing of 1856-1857
By the mid-nineteenth century the Xhosa had become desperate in their attempts to loosen the hold of European colonists on southern Africa. For over seventy years the Xhosa had been involved in increasingly savage warfare with the Dutch, British, and Afrikaners. Prophets like Nxele had risen to the aid of their people, only to be defeated by superior force. European governmental and religious institutions condemned indigenous African thought as uncivilized and degenerate to the newly- emerging white settler community. As whites formed stable social and economic institutions on the South African frontier, they relied far less upon patron-client relationships with the Xhosa and the reciprocity they entail. As white South Africa gained economic and political stability, South African whites stressed conformity to Western cultural norms. A century earlier the few whites on the veld lived a life very similar to, and dependent upon, their African neighbors. By 1850 an apartheid mentality was clearly developing.
Between the Sixth Kaffir War in 1834 and the Eighth Kaffir War in 1850, tensions between white and black reached their climax. It is no coincidence that the Xhosa cattle-killing movement followed the most intense twenty-year period of armed conflict the Xhosa had ever experienced. Most of Xhosaland never recovered, and the Cape boundaries extended as far as Natal by 1894. The Xhosa cattle-killing can thus be seen as the last serious attempt to “drive the whites into the sea.” The extreme nature of the slaughter—the destruction of their society’s economic backbone—must be understood in light of the repeated failures of Xhosa military resistance. It was as though the Xhosa, defeated by British guns and horsemen, turned to the heavens for help.
It is not unusual, in periods of massive economic, social, and demographic change, to witness a wide range of intellectual responses to a single dilemma. The aggressive “nationalism” of Nxele is one such reaction. But while Nxele stressed a combination of militaristic tactics and prophetic statements, the cattle-killing stressed only the latter. Behind the slaughter lay another, final, attempt to resolve traditional Xhosa beliefs with those of the Christian West.
The movement began early in 1856 with the visions of a young girl, Nongquase, and her development as a Xhosa spirit-medium. In her visions Nongquase saw ten black strangers at a pool near the Kei River. Her father, a diviner and member of the royal lineage, took these visions seriously. After four days of ritual purification, he confirmed his daughter’s prophecy, expanding on her pronouncements. He taught that the strangers at the pool were Russians (rumors of the Crimean War were widespread throughout South Africa at the time) involved in armed struggle against the British. In the Xhosa synthesis, the Russians—who were black—were perceived as mutual enemies of the British; together they could expel their Western oppressors.
But a militaristic movement did not develop. Instead, a “supernatural” one prevailed. In order to secure the help of the ancestors, followers taught, the Xhosa were to disavow their practice of witchcraft. But, most importantly, they were to destroy all of their cattle—the ultimate source of their livelihood—since they would be replaced in the “next world.” The millennium had come to Xhosaland, and cattle were the key to eternal peace.
To fully understand the cattle-killing movement, a number of cultural details need to be examined. Although prophetic visions and dreams were not considered extraordinary in Xhosa society, the appearance of female spirit-mediums was comparatively rare. Female participation in ritual events was, in principle, prohibited, but the cattle-killing was dominated by the visions of young girls.
For example, the chief of the neighboring Ndlembe ordered his people to slaughter their cattle after Nokosi, the daughter of a trusted diviner, had visions confirming those of Nongquase. The visions of women, especially in times of instability, were often taken seriously in Xhosa society, since they indicated a supernatural ability which might eventually culminate in the role of a diviner. Even considering the marked domination of men in ritual roles, a few women were able to rise above their customary status without challenging the dominant ideology. In the majority of cases, however, female spirit-mediums carried a status which was temporary and situational—one that rarely evolved into full religious and ritual leadership. This was clearly the pattern during the Xhosa cattle-killing.
The temporary, liminal nature of of the visions can be accounted for by the structure of religious and secular authority in Xhosaland. The prophecies of Nongquase, Nokosi, and their peers would almost certainly have been taken less seriously had it not been for their royal connections. The measure of a diviner’s success lay in his, or her, ability to gain a following. Diviners acted through the secular power of chiefs in Xhosaland; they were not independent agents. As in the case of Nxele, the ability of a diviner to gain a following was intimately linked to the authority of the chief. Nongquase and Nokosi, being daughters of diviners close to local chiefs, had an effective social “path” toward acceptance of their visions.
The rapid spread of the millenarian movement among the Xhosa was integrally connected to its acceptance by the paramount chiefs in Xhosaland and their most trusted advisers. As knowledge of the prophecy spread southwest into other Nguni chiefdoms, other diviners and their paramount chiefs confirmed Nongquase’s visions, helping to legitimize the movement in their own chiefdoms. Mhlakaza, the paramount chief of Gcalekaland, imploring his people toward action, began by sacrificing his favorite ox. Many people throughout Gcalekaland and neighboring chiefdoms responded by sacrificing their entire herds immediately. As the visions increased, Xhosaland became divided into groups of “believers” and “non-believers.” But an understanding of the movement is impossible without knowledge of the role of cattle in Xhosa life and thought.
The sacrificial role of cattle was an essential aspect of the religious beliefs of many African pastoralists. Xhosa tradition was no less influenced by the concept of sacrifice, but the destruction of entire herds was unprecedented. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnographic work on the pastoral Nuer is essential in an understanding of the role of cattle in the social, economic, and intellectual life of pastoral peoples, writes:
The ox a father gives his son at initiation provides him, through what Seligman calls “identification” with it, with a direct means of communication with the spiritual world. It is more than a possession, more than even part of his social personality—it is a point of meeting between soul and spirit and therefore has a sacramental character.[9]
Ritual sacrifice of cattle cannot be separated from the more practical economic and social elements associated with the animals. Their religious significance cannot be separated from their secular role in bridewealth, technology, and sustenance. Were we to underestimate their importance in everyday life, we would also surely fail to understand the essential element of sacrifice: that the Xhosa surrendered in sacrifice the most precious thing they possessed. With this, the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856-1857—an orgy of bovine sacrifice only loosely connected with traditional Xhosa sacrificial beliefs—takes on a profound significance.
The Xhosa millenarian prophecy represents a synthesis of Christian and Xhosa thought, a merging of the Xhosa sacrificial role of cattle and the Christian concept of the millennium. Nongquase’s visions of men and cattle emerging from pools of water and the subsequent insistence on purification and the renunciation of witchcraft were all connected to Xhosa patterns of divination. But the idea of the millennium, the replacement of the tainted present with a pristine future, was peculiarly Christian. But the distant millennium—deep and pervasive in Western theology—was interpreted by the Xhosa as the near future. A week, a month, a season, possibly a year—these were the limits of the Xhosa future. This, too, was the timetable for the Xhosa millennium.
In October of 1856, Mhlakaza, paramount chief of Gcalekaland, ordered that all remaining cattle be sacrificed within eight days, and on the ninth day the ancestors would return to the earth. He predicted, with the aid of his trusted diviners, that there would be a period of darkness, after which two suns would rise and battle for control of the earth. The visions of the suns, representing the forces of white and black, recalls Nxele’s synthesis in which the earth was a battleground between Tixo, the god of the whites, and Mdalidipu, the god of the blacks. Now the battle had moved to the sky, and the judgment was at hand.
Believers rose on the appointed day to see the battle, but the sun simply rose and set like countless days before. The prophet explained this with the message that disbelievers who had not yet killed their cattle had prevented the realization of the millennium. A few converted, and a new day was set for the following month. But this day, too, passed without event. Belief in the prophecy lingered on—in some areas for as long as three years.
The continued re-explanation of the millennium’s failure may seem odd to the Western mind, but it, too, is in accordance with traditional Xhosa cosmology. The role of what Robin Horton calls “secondary elaboration” plays a basic role in many African systems of thought.
In the theoretical thought of the traditional cultures there is a notable reluctance to register repeated failures of prediction and to act by attacking the beliefs involved. Instead, other current beliefs are utilized in such a way as to “excuse” each failure as it occurs, and hence to protect the major theoretical assumptions upon which the prediction is based.[10]
When it threatens the basic assumptions of a society’s thought, few are prepared to throw out their beliefs after a failure or two. For the Xhosa, those beliefs, based upon the sacrificial role of cattle, had an absolute validity. To abandon them would threaten total chaos in nature and culture. Westerners are no less secure during attacks on their most basic assumptions about the universe. Whether religion or science is involved, humans seek a sense of order in the world. The most profound threat to our powers of knowing is the idea that, as Einstein put it, “God plays dice with the universe.”[11]
*** ***
At least half of the Xhosa population perished in the aftermath of the cattle-killing. For countless others, wage labor at the Cape was the only alternative to starvation. There is little doubt that the millennial dreams which rested on the cattle sacrifice was a final effort to stem the tide of European intrusion. Having failed, their independence was gone. Although the Kaffir wars dragged on for another twenty years, for the Xhosa at least, the reality of Westernization had set in. Neither armed rebellion nor millenarian prophecy was able to halt the establishment of colonial rule in South Africa.
V
History and the Concept of Culture
In this essay, I have sought to emphasize the interdependence of historical narrative and ethnographic detail in the study of Xhosa religious beliefs. This can be extended to a discussion of the epistemological similarities between the two fields. The implications for the practice of anthropology are significant, since the integration of history and anthropology challenge common notions about the level of explanation and the relationship between theory and data in the two fields.
Anthropologists cross frontiers to explore societies other than their own. Historians cross time-spans to study earlier eras. It is the common concern with what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls otherness that unites the historical and ethnographic methods. It is also this concern that tends to separate these disciplines from the mainstream of Western social science. The historian or anthropologist, in the course of research, is confronted with a seemingly chaotic scheme of rules and customs that differ in spatial and temporal contexts. The central problem confronting any student of culture and history is how to account for the remarkable variability of human societies, without being drowned in a sea of detail.
So, too, do historians and anthropologists study change. While the study of change has been the central focus for generations of Western historians, it is only recently that anthropologists have freed themselves from the conceptual morass surrounding the “ethnographic present.” Anthropology, until recently dominated by ahistorical schools of thought—British structural-functionalism, French structuralism, and American culturalism—has been quite unable to develop adequate means of analyzing the movement of societies in time.
In the Xhosa intellectual response to the West, we have a case particularly well-suited to anthropological and historical analysis. My essay has stressed a similarity between the disciplines that extends both to the direction of inquiry and to a preference for the close study of particular peoples and events. The historian’s penchant for seemingly intractable particularities has traditionally been a barrier to cooperation with more aggressively generalizing social sciences. But ethnographers also have a primary concern with unique entities—cultural systems. Although both disciplines have found it necessary, indeed desirable, to refer beyond individual cases, this has not resulted in a coherent body of theory. This is not a reflection of the “unscientific” nature of the disciplines. It is, rather, a reflection of the level of questions asked of the data. Ethnographic investigation commits one to a specific pattern of inquiry and discussion, the point of which is as much the explication of a particular topic as the establishment of general principles.
The power of theory is much more closely related to the kind of question the student asks of the data than to its ability to answer “major” questions about the fate of nations or the structure of society. The object of historical and ethnographic research has traditionally been to enlarge the understanding of individual cases—the French Revolution, the role of exchange in the Trobriand Islands, historiography in Victorian England, or Azande witchcraft; it has not been the assimilation of these cases into general laws. Without an understanding of this basic tenet, it is impossible to accept the organization and detail of such studies.
It should be kept in mind that each field of study has its own “ways of knowing,” different levels of explanation. “What the great historians sought to describe, analyse, and explain”, writes Isaah Berlin, “is necessarily thick; that is the essence of history, its purpose, its pride, its reason for existence.”[12] This is no less relevant for the cultural anthropologist. The aim of anthropology, writes Clifford Geertz, “is to draw large conclusions from small, very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them with complex specifics.”[13] It is in the spirit of Berlin and Geertz that I wrote this essay. In the hope that general conclusions could be drawn from a detailed historical and ethnographic study of the Xhosa religious reaction to Western intrusion, I sought to describe—or narrate, as the case may be—a series of particular events, with large implications for a “science of culture,” which occurred over a century ago on the South African veld.
Perhaps the most perplexing problem in the study of culture today is the relationship between material infrastructure and the realm of ideas, beliefs, and values. Historians and anthropologists, given the materialist dogma that dominates contemporary social science, are forced to defend their work on the “superstructural” realm of society. As I have shown in my narrative, the Xhosa intellectual crisis followed a period of intense infrastructural change in the nineteenth century. But we will learn little about the Xhosa religious reaction if we limit ourselves to the study of demography, technology, and economics. It is not that they lack a relationship to thought; they clearly have one that is profound. But they do not constitute the base of a causal chain in which ideas, beliefs, and values directly follow. The intellectual response of the Xhosa and the social and economic havoc wrought by the British are inseparable. Thought and action, “material” and “ideal,” are only analytically separable. Human experience is not composed of inevitable sequences—now infrastructure, now superstructure—of cultural action. To argue for a causal chain from the material to the ideal is to deny that human beings shape and interpret their environment.
Only general conclusions can be drawn from general theories. The level of explanation an anthropologist uses is intimately bound to the degree of precision he seeks in his studies. From a demographic, technological, or economic base we can only derive “unit-ideas,” “belief-structures,” and “value-orientations.” In short, we can only lay out the broad constraints within which humans act and think. But humans experience “ideas,” “beliefs,” and “values,” not systems of them. As Max Weber wrote, thought is never a direct response to material conditions.[14]
What we seen in the Xhosa intellectual response is a dialogue between infrastructure and superstructure, if we must use those terms at all. The Xhosa, who destroyed ninety-five percent of their cattle—the center of their mode of production—in response to a millenarian prophecy, invert the materialists’ causal schema. The Xhosa cattle-killing is an example of ideas, beliefs, and values shaping the fate of nations and the structure of society. A proverb of the pastoral Nuer takes on ominous meaning in light of the Xhosa millenarian prophecies:
Nuer say that it is cattle that destroy people, for more people have died for the sake of a cow than for any other cause. Hence Nuer say of their cattle, “They will be finished together with mankind,” for men will all die on account of cattle and they and cattle will cease together.[15]
But we need not invoke such dramatic and, admittedly, extraordinary examples to argue for a freer dialogue between thought and material conditions. Material and social conditions framed the essential questions the Xhosa asked about their world during the cattle-killing, and their intellectual responses had an enormous effect upon the infrastructure. Nothing inherent in the material base of a society or its social structure, however, determines the qualities of thought as such. Using this as our base, we can speak only of general trends and macro-theories which, on their highest level of abstraction, are little more than truisms.
In this essay I sought to explicate the nature of a symbolic order within the Xhosa material world. When a Xhosa is born she enters not only a natural environment, but also a domesticated cultural environment which is the product of human labor and thought.[16] The inner world—beliefs, ritual, social structure, and economy—is constructed from an outer world which is shared with all of nature. This construction is what we take to be the culture of humans.
Within the infrastructure, then, lies a superstructure. A search for causal connections misses this essential point. “Any cultural ordering produced by material forces presupposes a cultural ordering of these forces,” writes Marshall Sahlins.[17] The Xhosa religious reaction was an intellectual response to profound social change. The social and economic impact of British colonialism on Xhosa society brought effects that were unexplainable in terms of traditional Xhosa thought. Xhosa prophets sought to redefine traditional Xhosa beliefs by adopting selected aspects of Christian thought. Like other intellectual syntheses, we can see in the Xhosa example the creation of a “symbolic universe” in which the problems of Xhosa society at that time could be resolved with traditional Xhosa thought.
Cultural theory does not exist at the abstract level, separated from the causes which generate it. “Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology,” writes Geertz, “longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry.”[18] The tension between the desire to study from the actors’ point of view, on the one hand, and the desire among academics for advances in conceptual rigor and analytical precision is not without solution.
Anthropologists do not, and historians should not, reject the pursuit of cultural theory. We must simply realize that such theory, in order to account for individual variation and temporal change, must stay “closer to the ground” than some disciplines care to do. The essential point is that cultural theories are not to be discovered through an eclectic search for universal models of social and cultural organization. Neither are they to be found through deductive reasoning based upon “scientific models.” Such a pursuit is a chimera, “born of a lack of understanding of the nature of natural science, of history, or both.”[19] The concept of culture, in short, cannot be separated from the society under study.
Our common goal as historians and anthropologists, then, should be to draw general conclusions from the unique and non-recurrent entities that have been the traditional sources of historical and anthropological research. Broad assertions about the role of culture in social life are to be sought by dealing with specifics in all of their complexity. Such specific knowledge can only be acquired from the close study of each society’s culture and history.
Summary
My study of the Xhosa cattle-killing in South Africa brings out the essential theoretical orientation of our disciplines, and represents a synthesis of my work in three fields at Carleton College—history, anthropology, and religion.
The importance of this brief historical event lies in the conflict at all levels between a small pastoral society and the British empire—a world power in the throes of early industrialization. Rather than carry out what would be a static, functional analysis of two societies—one industrial, one non-industrial—with no relationship to one another, I have chosen to examine, in its full historical context and ethnographic detail, the integration and conflict between two societies competing for the same resources. As opposed to many Western sociological and historical works on South Africa, which examine the black population as minorities in white society, my perspective restores the cultural dimension to Xhosa life and thought as they reacted to the most profound crisis on the South African sub-continent.
The Xhosa-British conflict in the nineteenth century is an excellent example of conflict at all levels of society, from demography, technology, and economics to beliefs and values. Even though I have chosen to examine the Xhosa religious reaction, an intellectual response to rapid social, economic, and demographic change, I find it necessary to consider in detail the material factors that gave rise to the intellectual dilemma. The historical and ethnographic “narrative”—created along the lines of “thick description,” leads into a theoretical conclusion in which I discuss the implications of “material” and “ideal” perspectives in the social sciences, and argue for the integration of history and anthropology.
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[1] Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), Chapter Four.
[2] DeKiewit, C.W., A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (Oxford, 1965), Chapter One.
[3] Lewis, I.M., Ecstatic Religion (Penguin, 1971), Chapter Two.
[4] Mbiti, John, African Religions and Philosophy (Doubleday, 1969), 3.
[5] Mbiti, John, African Religions and Philosophy (Doubleday, 1969), 27.
[6] Roux, Edward, Time Longer Than Rope (Wisconsin, 1964), 12.
[7] Roux, Edward, Time Longer Than Rope (Wisconsin, 1964), 13.
[8] Roux, Edward, Time Longer Than Rope (Wisconsin, 1964), 14.
[9] Evans-Pritchard, E.E., “The Sacrificial Role of Cattle Among the Nuer” Africa 23 (1953), 183.
[10] Horton, Robin, “African Traditional Thought and Western Science” Africa 37 (1967), 167.
[11] Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 100-101.
[12] Berlin, Isaah, “The Concept of Scientific History” History and Theory 1 (1961), 30.
[13] Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 100-101.
[14] Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Scribners, 1958), 180-183; 283-284.
[15] Evans-Pritchard, E.E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), 50.
[16] Godelier, Maurice, “Infrastructures, Societies and History” Current Anthropology 19.4 (1978), 763-765.
[17] Sahlins, Marshall, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago, 1976), 39.
[18] Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 24.
[19] Berlin, Isaah, “The Concept of Scientific History” History and Theory 1 (1961), 25.
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