Bulletproof: afterlives of anticolonial prophecy in South Africa and beyond (review)

The arresting title of Wenzel’s work is a reference to the oft-repeated claim by prophets of anti-colonial millenarian movements that they could render their followers invulnerable to the weapons of their enemies. Wenzel takes up this notion as a starting point from which to explore the apparent paradox of such ‘failed’ movements: that their prophetic visions of regeneration and liberatory aims, while failing to materialize in the present, nevertheless demonstrate a resistance and resilience – a certain ‘bulletproofness’ that enables them to be conscripted into the service of subsequent endeavours. In so doing, Wenzel probes the intricate nature and mechanism of prophecy – its ‘magic’ (which the author describes as ‘an expansive term for the supernatural, mysterious, or wondrous that crosses temporal, colonial, and theological divides’, p. 12), heterotemporality, metaphor and materiality. While the author expounds the idea of ‘unfailure’ through close readings of the textual afterlives of these movements – the ‘sites where unrealized visions of anticolonial projects continue to assert their power’ (p. 5) – Wenzel’s is a sophisticated interdisciplinary project whose appeal extends well beyond literary-critical circles.

A minor criticism is that the scope and transnational imbrications suggested by the sub-title (the importance of which, for post-colonial studies, is discussed in the Introduction), belies the focal point and substance of the work. This project is, in fact, almost exclusively occupied with the mid-nineteenth-century millenarian movement commonly (which is not to say exclusively and unproblematically) referred to as the Xhosa Cattle-Killing. To make this observation, however, is not to detract from the import of this work. For, as an example of a ‘failed’ anticolonial millenarian movement whose dreams of renewal continue to haunt the present (both nationally and, to a lesser extent, beyond), the Cattle-Killing certainly serves Wenzel’s purpose.

The movement, instigated by the prophetess Nongqawuse in the context of pervasive cultural and material pressures and repeated skirmishes between colonist and Xhosa on the eastern border of the Cape Colony, resulted in a significant loss of life, the proletarization of a large section of Xhosa society and the appropriation of land by the colonial government. Ultimately, it broke the back of Xhosa resistance to colonial rule.

What makes Wenzel’s choice of the Cattle-Killing as the focus of her study particularly interesting and important is that, despite the magnitude and significance of the movement, it has received relatively little critical attention. Only one full-length historical study has been published: Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise (Ravan Press, 1989, reissued with an Afterword in 2003). And although numerous creative and factual literary responses abound (traversing divisions of race, gender, class and ideology as well as those of form and genre), no general surveys or bibliographies of the events exist. Despite Gérard’s 1978 observation, too, that ‘there is certainly room for a thorough investigation of the Nongqause motif in the Bantu literature of South Africa’ (Four African Literatures, University of California Press, 1971, p. 225), such a project (whether limited to works by black authors or extended more generally) has not been taken up. Bulletproof is, in fact, the first published work to assemble and give extended consideration to a number of the Cattle-Killing’s textual afterlives.

Indeed Wenzel’s study covers a vast array of narratives, both semi-fictional and historical, from the familiar (H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl Who Killed to Save (1936) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000)) to a host of lesser-known texts. Together they amply demonstrate the multiple uses to which the Cattle-Killing (or ideas and images associated with it) have been put, as well as the movement’s continued resonance since 1856. It is a pity that Bradford and Qotole’s long-overdue translation of Gqoba’s narrative of 1888 (the first unabridged English translation to be published) was...