| Back |
SANDILE |
| Although we do not have the datum concerning the birth and death of Sandile, we can situate his role in South African history because he was one of the central figures in what has been referred to as the Nongqawuse Episode or as the Cattle-Killing Episode or what the great Xhosa novelist and New African literary historian A. C. Jordan in Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa designates as the “National Suicide of the Xhosa People” in 1856-7. In other words, Sandile, one of the Xhosa chiefs during this tragic episode in the middle of the nineteenth-century, was a near contemporary of Tiyo Soga, the first major modern African intellectual who had to engage himself with the historical consequences of the entrance of European modernity into African history. Soga was a great proselytizer for modernity and Christianity. Sandile himself was caught in a profound state of hesitancy, uncertainty and ambivalence at this historical divide between modernity and tradition. This great hesitancy of Sandile is captured indirectly through one of his important subjects in Tiyo Soga’s Journal note of July 24, 1860: “I went out today to Sakela’s Kraal---I had in going two special objects in mind---to vaccinate the people against the small pox now raging brutally in some parts of Kaffraria and the Colony---I founs however, to my diasppointment---and the disappointment of the people---that the two young people I had previously vaccinated & from whom I expected to vaccinate the others, had not yet taken the virus---My other object in going was to see Sakela---one of Sandilli’s men---who there is every reason to hear is falling into decline---When I saw him today, he was better---& somewhat cheerful---but he is decidely falling off, & in a little I fear, will I fear have to succumb to the progress of the fatal disease---I held a meeting in the Kraal in which there wd be about twenty persons---It was really one of the most interesting meetings I have had with my poor benighted country-men---After I preached---& engaged in prayer---I said to them---‘Do you know---my friends---that you---Gaikas, were considered to be somewhat hardened against the word---You offer no outward opposition to it---When we come among you, you received us well---and listen well to what we have to say---But you show no special feeling towards it---one way---or other---You listen to it. Like men, who either had heard enough---or who didn’t care about it---Now why is this? I for one regard it a good symptom in men to be properly inquisitive about these [?] strange news that have come to us---It is our interest to know & understand---all that is said to come to us from God’---I was delighted with the spirit in which they took up my remarks---Sakela himself and a brother of his, and a woman, whose heart was really seriously interested in the things we were speaking of---She too joined most humbly in the conversation” (The Journal and Selected Writings of The Reverand Tiyo Soga, (ed.) Donovan Williams, A. A. Balkema, Cape Town, 1983). The hesitancy and ambivalence of Sandile concerning modernity reflects the effects of the Cattle-Killing Episode among the Xhosa people, an episode that broke the spiritual bondage of this great nation to its past or to its traditional alignments. There is a graphic representation of this tragic event, the Nongqawuse Episode or Cattle-Killing Episode, by one who witnessed it as a young man of seventeen. This witness was William Wellington Gqoba, the first modern Xhosa poet who changed the direction of Xhosa literary culture. He writes, recalling an event that had occurred many decades earlier in 1856-7: “As the killing of the cattle went on, those who had slaughtered hurriedly for fear of being smelt out began to starve and had to live by stealing the livestock of others. Then everybody looked forward to the eighth day. It was the day on which the sun was expected to rise red, and to set again in the sky. Then there would follow great darkness, during which the people would shut themselves in their huts. Then the dead would rise and return to their homes, and then the light of day would come again. On that day the sun rose as usual. Some people washed their eyes with sea-water at the mouth of the Buffalo. Some peered outside through little apertures in their huts, while those who had never believed went about their daily outdoor tasks. Nothing happened. The sun did not set, no dead person came back to life, and not one of the things that had been predicted came to pass. Such then was the Nongqawuse catastrophe. The people died of hunger and disease in large numbers. Thus it was that whenever thereafter a person said an unbelievable thing, those who heard him, said: ‘You are telling a Nongqawuse tale’” (Cited in A. C. Jordan’s Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa (1950s; 1973: University of California Press, pp. 74-5; the original Xhosa version had appeared in Walter Rubusana’s Zemk’ inkomo magwalandini [The Cattle are Departing, You Cowards], 1906). It was this tragic episode as well as the defeat of the Xhosa nation by British imperialism in Frontier wars that broke the spirit of Sandile. It is the dissolute and a confused Sandile that we encounter in J. B. Peires’ The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856-7 (Ravan Press, 1989). Sandile in many ways is comparable to the fictionalized Mzilikazi in Solomon T. Plaatje’s Mhudi who comes to a frightening realization that the historical period he represented had forcefully been brought to an end by stronger technological and historical forces, and a new era had begun of which he had no wherewithal to participate in: “From the top of the hill, Mzilikazi saw his men marching spear in hand and shoulder to shoulder, forming an easy target for the insatiable fireof the musketeers. He saw his brave men mown down and the allies retreating to reload; he saw the confused ranks of his army reforming and returning to the charge, only to be mown down again and the decimated ranks scattering in wild confusion, leaving the battle-field bestrewnwith the dead bodies of their fallen comrades. . . . Surveying the ruins of all his hopes and remembering the rich, red Matabele blood sacrificed so lavishly, in hopes that the end would justify the means, and contemplating the inevitable gloom with which he stood face to face, Mzilikazi heaved a deep sigh and wished that he held the keys to open the gateways of the elements of thunder and lightining, so as to command these forces to hurry down and annihilate and blot out forever the armies of his tormentors” (Heinemann, Portsmouth, 1978 [1930], pp. 170, 174). Like Mzilikazi, Sandile did not possess the keys to modernity. That Tiyo Soga had the keys to modernity can be gleaned from this passage: “The state of the heathen around us is just now very interesting---The Kaffirs---my own countrymen---are still very careless and manifest only outward respect for the word---Sandilli swayed too much by evil advisers, I was afraid, was retrograding towards the old Kaffir habits, the destruction of which, the recent national calamities---threatened and partially effected---By a sudden impulse---one of the characteristics of a weak mind---he will again begin to take an interest in the Station & to attend the Sabbath services--- . . . .“ Although Sandile and Tiyo Soga belonged to the same historical moment, they were fundamentally different from each other because of the different historical tempos to which they responded: Modernity or Tradition! | |