"Do Not Fall Asleep in Your Enemy's Dream:" John Edgar Wideman and the Predicaments of Prophecy

The title of John Edgar Wideman’s latest novel The Cattle Killing (1996) ¹ refers to an episode in South African history still vehemently debated among scholars: the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856 and 1857 which resulted in the proud nation losing its independence and its people becoming an oppressed class within the South African colony. The great importance the author attributes to this event and especially to the prophecy that seems to have sparked it shows in the fact that he moved the incident back in time and made it the kernel of a novel related to the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which in an earlier story he had presented as an occasion for black heroism and pride. ² This narrative gesture is typical of the book’s dynamic structure in which stories weave in and out of memories, dreams, and epileptic fits, reappear embedded in other stories, and reach back to first-order “reality,” to create a web of stunning complexity and seemingly limitless metamorphosis. Both events—the cattle-killing episode and the yellow fever epidemic—involve disease and betrayal, hope muted by skepticism, and, above all, visions and ritual acts of bonding and unbonding across time barriers which hint at metaphysical predicaments occasioned by moments of crisis.

As the historian J.B. Peires painstakingly documents in the first scholarly analysis of the ordeal, ³ the great Xhosa cattle-killing movement was an extremely complex affair in which tribal politics clashed with colonialist machinations, chiliastic predictions complemented issues of disease control, rational considerations vied with irrational reactions. The unprecedented slaughtering may have been in part a quite expedient response to the terrible European lung sickness with which South African cattle had been infected due to a Dutch shipment of sick bulls in 1853. Yet the cattle-killing was performed by a majority of the Xhosa as a great purification rite sparked by several millenialist visions and prophecies.

The most famous of these visions is that of 15-year old Nongqawuse. She claimed she had been accosted by strangers professing to be her dead relatives who ordered her to inform her people that they should get rid of their herds and avoid planting any crops. They should prepare themselves for the arrival of the “new people” who would come out of the sea with new, healthy cattle, would drive the whites back into the ocean, and would establish peace and prosperity among the Xhosa. Attempts by several skeptical chiefs to ascertain the truth of the prophecy met with doubtful scenarios that extended from obfuscation to pretense and thus led to contradictory instructions and behavior: some Xhosa sold their cattle, some killed only part of their herd, some killed the lot. Of course, the utopian predictions never materialized, and the Xhosa nation collapsed. ⁴ According to Peires, most Xhosa still claim today that Nongqawuse was manipulated into prophesying by Sir George Grey, the despotic governor of the Cape Colony. No documentary evidence has yet been found to confirm this, yet it seems certain that without Grey’s ruthless exploitation of the process after it had started, a catastrophe could have been averted. ⁵

Peires’s analysis and interpretation of the Xhosa’s behavior shows that it blended traditional African religious and cultural beliefs with elements of Christianity in order to make sense of, and find a way of overcoming, a situation or condition of impending disaster which had been brought about by the inroads the whites had already made on their territory. In other words, the historian tries to balance praise and blame when he discusses the cattle-killing and warns us against condemning it merely as a suicidal act. ⁶ Wideman takes a different view. His approach is ethical and political, perhaps even spiritual, and so he focuses primarily on Nongqawuse and her vision which he interprets as a central case of false prophecy and then transforms it into a warning directed at African Americans across the centuries. ⁷ The epigraph to part two of the book is from Ezekiel 13:22: “But...