Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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prophesied the arrival of white people with a coin on one hand and a Bible on the other. Yet this had nothing to do with Ntsikana’s prophetic powers. As one of Van der Kemp’s earliest converts in Bethelsdorp, Ntsikana drew on his direct experience with the missionaries and on the Bible. Jordan also argues that in Ntsikana’s world divination was not uncommon, and could not be reduced to the influence of white missionaries. More importantly, Jordan offers a secular interpretation of Ntsikana’s significance, and it is within this intellectual trajectory that I seek to place Steve Biko. In his own way, Steve was, as Mostert observed, a beneficiary of a long tradition started by Ntsikana but also a critic of that culture. Here is how Jordan describes Ntsikana’s enduring legacy:
The importance of Ntsikana lies not in the smitings by the shafts of sunrise, or in the rising winds and readings from karosses. The fact that his Hymn of Praise is the first literary composition ever to be assigned to individual formulation – thus constituting a bridge between the traditional and the post-traditional period – is of great historical significance. Even more important than this is the fact that, through his influence, a few young disciples were introduced to the arts of reading and writing, and that, inspired by his exemplary life and teaching, these men became the harbingers of the dawn of literacy among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa. [43]
The differences between Ntsikana and Nxele were more political than spiritual. When Ntsikana attempted to proselytise Ndlambe, the latter cautioned that “each ear will hear a different thing because I am still listening to Nxele”.
Nxele, Ntsikana’s chief rival, preached in a more innovative idiom. After an unsatisfactory dalliance with Christianity, and through increasing dissatisfaction with white cattle-raiding, Nxele rejected the concept of a white God in the heavens and preached that Mdalidiphu under the ground was the true God of the Xhosa. He subsequently led the Xhosa army in the Battle of Grahamstown (1819) where the Xhosa suffered severe casualties – estimates of casualties range from 1 000 to 2 000. Incarcerated on Robben Island, he participated in a prisoner break-out but the boat in which he was travelling capsized and he was drowned in the cold Atlantic Ocean. He had promised his people that he would come back, and in apparent fulfilment of that promise he died trying to escape from the island by swimming across the Atlantic. Today the Xhosa people speak of ukuza kukaNxele – the return of Nxele – to mock a failed promise. Noel Mostert is of the view that “victory for Nxele at Grahamstown would have seen the collapse of the frontier as the colonists fled westwards towards the Cape, as they usually did on such critical occasions”.[44]
According to Peires, notwithstanding the differences between Ntsikana and Nxele, both individuals were grappling with adapting to the “irruption of the European”:
Nxele’s nationalist theology emerged as a result of white hostility to his version of Christianity and to his patron Ndlambe, whereas Ntsikana’s pacifism was due to the political circumstances of his sponsor, Ngqika . . . Their attraction depended not on their charisma or their supernatural abilities, but on their power to reinterpret a world which had suddenly become incomprehensible. They are giants because they transcend the specifics to symbolise the opposite poles of Xhosa response to Christianity and the West: Nxele representing struggle, Ntsikana submission. [45]
Peires argues that after the Xhosa were subdued, particularly around the Fourth Frontier War of 1811–1812, the political leadership passed from the chiefs to the prophet-intellectuals. People hoped that they might answer the questions: “Who were these white people? What did they want? What should be done about them?”[46] These existential questions went to the heart of Black Consciousness in the face of white racism in the 1970s. In the early 1800s the answers to these questions were not so clear – they ranged from submission to various forms of resistance. After Nxele (aka Makana), subsequent Xhosa chiefs found themselves confronted with the same questions – not only in response to the colonial government but also to the missionaries. And here we can see the parallels with the questions that the Black Consciousness Movement was faced with in the 1960s – not just how to deal with the colonial government but also with those who sympathised with the cause of black people, whom the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Robert Sobukwe, called abelungu abasithandayo – “whites who love us”.
Relationships with Missionaries – Friends or Enemies?
In his book The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, Martin Legassick describes missionaries as “the main mediators of colonial politics and culture among the Khoisan and the Xhosa”. Early missionaries such as Van der Kemp were opposed to the racist and murderous policies of the colonial government. One of the early exponents of liberatory theology, Van der Kemp believed that God would intervene on behalf of the oppressed. He immersed himself in the life of the Khoisan – ate their food, wore their clothes and married a slave girl. He established his mission in Bethelsdorp as “an imperium in imperio – a place with its own moral code” – an example of non-racial co-existence among the different races. Although he had been sent to civilise the “savages”, Van der Kemp protested the evil among the Boers and the British who enslaved them. He warned the colonists – a warning that would fall on deaf ears for the better part of the next two centuries – that “there is no way of governing this country other than by the government doing justice to the natives. In no other way can the Boers escape the hand of Providence than by acknowledging their guilt.”[47]
Even after Van der Kemp’s death in 1811, his contemporary James Read – called Ngcongolo[48] by the Xhosa – continued to insist on humane treatment of “the natives”, and opposed the expulsion of the Xhosa from the Zuurveld. As pointed out earlier, Governor Somerset had succeeded with his divide-and-rule policies by buying off the Xhosa chief, Ngqika. He corralled the missionaries who followed Van der Kemp and Read to be on the colonial government’s side. Missionaries were expected to be the government’s “eyes and ears” among the Xhosa, enabling the government to enforce its policy of punishment by reprisal. This entailed the burning of crops and the raiding of cattle in retribution for one transgression or another. An increasingly racist policy of extermination was now in place in Britain and was being enforced with the utmost ruthlessness by colonial governors and some of the missionaries, who evangelised in support of Britain’s growing imperialism.
And here one begins to see the emergence of a patronising attitude among the missionaries towards the “natives”. John Philip, superintendent of the London Missionary Society, for example, rejected slavery but only because he saw a potential consumer market among the Khoisan and the Xhosa. What was needed was to “elevate” them to a level of cultural development more aligned with missionary and European norms. We see the same condescending but ultimately contemptuous approach as that adopted towards the Khoi and the San in the preceding century. Philip’s mission was to:
. . . raise uncivilised and wandering hordes, which formerly subsisted by chase and by plunder, to the condition of settled labourers and cultivators of the soil, to lead them to increase the sum of productive labour and to become consumers of the commodities of other countries, to convert such as were a terror to the inhabitants of an extended frontier into defenders of that frontier against the inroads of remoter barbarians. [49]
By the 1820s this “humane” approach was increasingly supplanted by a portrayal of the Xhosa as lazy, libidinous and thieves. Philip, who had written that “the Caffres are not the savages one reads about in books”[50], was replaced by the openly racist Henry Calderwood. And here we see the church laying the seeds of the prohibition of inter-racial relationships:
The radical evangelism of Van der Kemp and Read, which allowed and even encouraged interaction