The Prophecies Nongqawuse

By the middle of the 19^th century the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape region in South Africa had suffered from eight frontier wars with Boers and a cattle plague brought in from Europe by settlers, which had killed thousands of animals. In their despair, they clung to the prophecies of sixteen-year-old Xhosa women named Nongqawuse who had promised her people the resurrection of all their herds and the destruction of the whites. 

On 18 February 1857, she prophesied that two suns would rise and a whirlwind would sweep the white settlers into the sea, and called for the killing of all cattle and the burning of all food supplies as sacrificial offerings. This was done: at least 200,000 cattle were slaughtered, and as a result more than 40,000 Xhosa starved to death and another 30,000 fled to other parts of the country in quest of food. Nongqawuse was arrested and imprisoned on Robben Island; she died in 1898 somewhere in the Eastern Cape, where she had been living in exile. 

The depopulated region was preoccupied by 2 300 ex-soldiers, veterans of the Crimean War, and 4 000 German immigrants.