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INTRODUCTION The struggle for freedom and land began almost as soon as the Dutch set foot on South African soil in the mid-seventeenth century. A century of sporadic wars occurred from 1750 to 1850, and there were many efforts to resist the development of white apartheid which was present from the beginning, in fact if not in name. Many Africans struggled, some dying in the effort, against white encroachment and hegemony. Two of the most interesting heroic figures lived in the nineteenth century. Both are frequently dealt with by contemporary historians as peripheral characters, moving on the edges of the more familiar history of Dutch generals and English commissioners, of voortrekkers and mining magnates, of bold and determined European armies and Dutch throngs struggling against faceless Africans. But names like Smuts and Botha, van Riebeeck and Rhodes2 are less significant to Africans than names like Nongqawuse and Chakijana, figures too often treated with sullen disdain and condescension by European historians. Ndumiso Bhotomane and Masithathu Zenani tell Nongqawuse's story, and Sondoda Ngcobo relates two stories of Chakijana. Ngcobo first recounts one of the myriad tales of the trickster, Chakijana, of the Zulu oral tradition; then, within that context, he recounts the story of the historical Chakijana. The oral imaginative and historical traditions come to a juncture here. Two other views of the role of Chakijana in the Bambatha Rebellion are given, one by an Englishman, Frederick William Calverley, the other by an Afrikaner, P. W. van Niekerk. Like the names of other contributors to this volume, Sondoda Ngcobo is a pseudonym; he was sensitive about the stories that he told, worried about possible repercussions, but nevertheless insistent that they reach a wider audience. He requested anonymity. ONE Africans sought to maintain their independence against an increasingly hostile set of white settlers who moved north from the Cape. In contemporary times, one thinks of three major events that precipitated a free South Mrica: the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, the Soweto uprising of 1976, and the virtual revolution of 1985. But these were not isolated incidents : they were one of a piece, an unbroken effort on the part of Africans to remain free people. In the nineteenth century, two persons caught the imagination of Africans who quested for freedom. Both seem, at first glance, to be unlikely 293 294 Part Four: Uncertain Hope heroes-one a girl, the other "Just a person." But each came to embody significant streams of resistance among the Africans one least often hears from, the Africans of the rural countryside. One of these heroes was a Xhosa girl, Nongqawuse, the other a Zulu youth, Chakijana. During my wanderings up and down the southeastern coast of the continent, I heard their names again and again. On September 9, 1967, I went to Nongqawuse country, along the Gxarha River, in kwaNkonki in Centane District in the Transkei. I was with Mr. Velaphi Mzini, an eighty-year-old Ngqika man. We sat at the edge of the Gxarha River at one of the precise spots where Nongqawuse saw her visions. We were near the Indian Ocean, in a remote area at the bottom of a steep valley . On one side of the Gxarha River is a sharp incline covered with dense foliage and euphorbia trees which, it is said, cast their weird shadows on the water and resembled human beings. These shadows, said Mr. Mzini, were pointed to by the Xhosa people as proof of Nongqawuse's visions. The other side is the floor of the river valley. Nongqawuse lived in a house at the top of the sheer incline, and the pathway she used to come down to the river for water is still remembered. Several spots in the river were indicated as important areas in the history of Nongqawuse.3 "Nongqawuse, Mhlakaza's daughter, gathered the people together," said Mr. Mzini, "and she told them to come to this estuary of the Gxarha. And the people saw shadows here in the water. Nongqawuse said, 'Here are people, about to rise from the dead. The cattle must be slaughtered, the reserve corn-pits should be emptied-all that food must be disposed of. People will rise from the dead!' "She preached about that, and the people did what she told them to do. They did that thing. The people of that time were not as alert as those who are living now. They were foolish: Who would observe shadows here in the water, then conclude that they are...

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