"Apocalypse Now"
Bright red aloes, rolling hills and fast-flowing rivers, not unlike the foothills of Nyangani, adorn the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
It was here in the lovely land of the Gcaleka Xhosa 150 years ago that southern Africa witnessed for the first time that devastating phenomenon that in a later age Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe would choose to call land reform.
Inspired by the charismatic visions and Joan of Arc "voices" of a beautiful 16-year-old girl named Nongqawuse, the Xhosa people decided that in order to rid their land of military defeat, cattle sickness, witchcraft and, above all, to blast the white man back across the ocean forever, they had to systematically destroy their own livelihood and in fact their whole economy.
All cattle were to be killed, all foodstocks destroyed and even seed maize eaten. Nothing was to be left. Only then would the ancestors return and restore a "happy state of things" in a new land fat with corn and cattle and peace.
Bright red aloes, rolling hills and fast-flowing rivers, not unlike the foothills of Nyangani, adorn the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
It was here in the lovely land of the Gcaleka Xhosa 150 years ago that southern Africa witnessed for the first time that devastating phenomenon that in a later age Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe would choose to call land reform.
Inspired by the charismatic visions and Joan of Arc "voices" of a beautiful 16-year-old girl named Nongqawuse, the Xhosa people decided that in order to rid their land of military defeat, cattle sickness, witchcraft and, above all, to blast the white man back across the ocean forever, they had to systematically destroy their own livelihood and in fact their whole economy.
All cattle were to be killed, all foodstocks destroyed and even seed maize eaten. Nothing was to be left. Only then would the ancestors return and restore a "happy state of things" in a new land fat with corn and cattle and peace.