The Finger of God

Enoch Mgijima, the Israelites, and the Bulhoek Massacre in South Africa

Robert R. Edgar

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780813941028
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813941035
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

On the morning of May 24, 1921, a force of eight hundred white policemen and soldiers confronted an African prophet, Enoch Mgijima, and some three thousand of his followers. Called the Israelites, they refused to leave their holy village of Ntabelanga, where they had been gathering since early 1919 to await the end of the world. While the Israelites maintained they were there to pray and worship in peace, the white authorities viewed them as illegally squatting on land that was not theirs. After many months of fruitless negotiations, the South African government sent an armed force to Bulhoek, a village in the Eastern Cape, to expel them. In the event that has come to be known as the Bulhoek massacre, police armed with rifles, machine guns, and cannons killed nearly two hundred Israelites wielding knobkerries, swords, and spears.

In The Finger of God, Robert Edgar reveals how and why the Bulhoek massacre occurred. Edgar asks: Why did Mgijima prophesize that the end of the world was imminent, and why did he summon his followers to Ntabelanga? Why did the South African government regard the Israelite encampment as a threat? Examining this clash between a government and a millenial movement, Edgar considers the Bulhoek massacre both as a signal event in South African history and as an example of similar conflicts worldwide.

1 The Promised Land

The origins of Enoch Mgijima’s confrontation with the government extend back to dramatic transformations that drove Africans to search for secure “promised lands.” One of these developments involved the “turbulent times” of the Mfecane, an early nineteenth-century eruption of political conflicts and widespread migrations in southern Africa. The other experience—of war and violent conquest—was unleashed by British colonists seizing African land in the eastern Cape.

The first development emerged from the often violent centralization and fragmentation of chiefdoms.¹ Historians are still assessing the causes of these momentous changes, among them increasingly hostile competition over trade routes from Delagoa Bay and the Cape interior, population growth resulting in environmental stresses, and fierce struggles over cattle and grazing land. These conflicts propelled movements of people from present-day South Africa to as far north as Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania. On the way, these migrants remade their ethnic identities.² Near the epicenter of this turmoil in what is now KwaZulu Natal, some groups, including Mgijima’s family, fled their ancestral homes southward along the Indian Ocean coast, where they began to be assimilated into isiXhosa-speaking communities.

The second experience, triggered by colonists encroaching on the lands of isiXhosa-speaking groups living between the Kei and Sunday Rivers, severely disrupted the eastern Cape for many decades. The first European newcomers were Boer cattle keepers who trekked into the region in the early eighteenth century. Their desultory struggles with Xhosa cattle keepers over grazing pastures sparked a few heated skirmishes in which the balance of power did not change. The arrival of British forces in 1806, however, altered everything. Throughout the nineteenth century they gradually conquered most of southern Africa, and in the eastern Cape their military might was decisive. After they exerted “a proper degree of terror” to subjugate Chief Ndlambe’s Xhosa in 1812, the British army ruthlessly prosecuted wars in 1819, 1834–35, 1846–47, and 1850–53 that opened up land for white settlement.³ Although imperial officials in London resolved to return some territory to Xhosa following the 1834–35 war, white wool farmers living in the eastern Cape since the early 1820s successfully lobbied to overturn this decision in the next decade.

The end result was the disintegration of Xhosa sovereignty into factional strife, which the British manipulated, in part to forge strategic military alliances with groups like Mgijima’s Mfengu people, who gave their soldiers and loyalty to the crown in three wars in return for grants of land.

Exile

The Mgijimas were among the families displaced by the upheavals of the Mfecane. Their journey to the eastern Cape began in the foothills of the Ukahlamba/Drakensberg when family members joined the Hlubi diaspora after Matiwane’s Ngwane smashed Chief Mthimkulu’s Hlubi chiefdom around 1819 in what the Hlubi call the izwekufa, “the destruction of the nation.”⁴ The Hlubi splintered into a number of groups. One headed north to the Highveld and joined the many groups contesting for power. Some found sanctuary among Moshoeshoe’s Basotho kingdom, while others continued further, crossing the Orange River into what became known as the Herschel district. Another band under Chief Langalibalele also migrated into Sotho-speaking areas before heading back to the east, where they established a base in the Estcourt area. Yet another group moved southwest to Griqualand East around Qumbu and Matatiele. The Mgijimas, including Enoch Mgijima’s grandfather, Mgijima, and his father, Jonas Mayekiso, were part of a fourth group under the leadership of Matomela and one of the sons of Mthimkulu II, Mhlambiso, who also trekked to the southwest, passing through Griqualand East and Thembuland before finding sanctuary among the Gcaleka Xhosa.

During the 1820s many emigrants, including Hlubi groups, settled among the Gcaleka kingdom. Because many of the groups were impoverished, the Gcaleka began calling them by a collective name, “Mfengu,” a word derived from siyamfenguza, meaning “we are hungry and seeking shelter.” The Gcaleka and Mfengu and European missionaries and colonial administrators put forward two very different explanations about how the Gcaleka treated them. The Gcaleka/Mfengu version casts the Gcaleka in a favorable light, maintaining that their chief Hintsa received them as he would have any newcomers by giving them the opportunity to incorporate themselves into Gcaleka society.⁵ Through a customary practice of client-ship called busa, “strangers” attached themselves to Gcaleka households as clients, which provided them with enough milk and grain to support their families and the means to replenish their cattle herds. Eventually, they aimed to put themselves on an independent footing. Even though they had full rights and responsibilities during the early stages of assimilation, the Mfengu clearly played a subordinate role. On the other hand, British missionaries and colonial administrators depicted the Mfengu as a class of oppressed slaves who seized the opportunity to escape Gcaleka over-lordship and move into British-controlled territory across the Kei River.

Leaving aside the two different interpretations, it is clear that many Mfengu did not assimilate smoothly into Gcaleka society. During their wanderings the multiple shocks that Hlubi and other emigrant groups experienced left a deep-rooted distrust of outsiders and made them wary of extending loyalty to any host group, however generous they might be. They concealed who their chiefs were, fearing that they would be killed if their identities were exposed.⁶ Richard Moyer has argued that the trauma and insecurities they experienced during their migrations and settling among Xhosa groups were critical in developing a suspicion of both whites and other Africans and their lack of “faith in their capacity to protect themselves” and “in their leaders and ancestral spirits.”⁷

If external forces had not disrupted the developing relationship between Mfengu and Gcaleka, perhaps the assimilation process ultimately might have been successful, but the Mfengu arrived as the Gcaleka were starting to resist colonial conquest. Many Mfengu did not automatically identify with the Xhosa cause and instead transferred their loyalty to the British, whom they did not initially perceive as enemies and who also appeared to have the military advantage and lands to offer them. In the 1834–35 war between the Gcaleka and the British, many Mfengu either remained neutral or openly worked for the British as intelligence gatherers, messengers, and soldiers.⁸ Shortly after the British forces crossed the Kei River into Hintsa’s territory, they were joined by Mfengu chiefs and herdsmen who brought along their own cattle or seized them from their employers. The British settled them between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers. By ceding this land to the Mfengu, the British thought that the Mfengu would be bound to them for protection and would remain faithful allies.

On the British side was the Wesleyan Methodist missionary John Ayliff, who oversaw the mission station at Butterworth in the Gcaleka chiefdom. The Wesleyans had commenced their work in the eastern Cape with the thirty-five hundred English colonists who settled in the Albany district in 1820. One of them was Ayliff, an unapologetic defender of British imperial rule. He saw God’s hand at work in human history in both the allocation of land to the Old Testament Israelites and the expansion of the British Empire. “Hence it is that GOD has given to Britain more colonial territory than to all Europe; she is marked out by Providence to be the great mother of Empires.”⁹ He did, however, draw an interesting comparison between the fate of the Israelites and the Xhosa people. Just as the Israelites lost their “original inheritance,” so, too, did the Xhosa because they failed to adequately develop the land: “The former inhabitants of this part of the world has [sic] not answered the purpose for which infinite Goodness and Wisdom had given them this land as their habitation. He appointed another people, speaking another language, to succeed them, planting them in this land, and giving them Albany for a possession.”¹⁰

Determined to spread the Gospel to the “unblessed” and to develop the “vast natural and moral [African] wilderness,” Ayliff became a Wesleyan missionary assistant in 1825 among slaves, Khoikhoi, and Xhosas. Six years later he took up residence at Butterworth, one of a chain of Wesleyan mission stations stretching from the eastern Cape to Natal. In 1835, he put another spin on providential design by describing the Mfengu migrations and what he called their delivery from Gcaleka bondage as another manifestation of God’s will: “They were ignorant of Isreal’s [sic] God, they knew nothing of his Providence, but were a host of desolate, destitute, wandering savages, wandering they knew not where—though in subsequent days a change from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, has made them acquainted with that hand, which though unknown and unacknowledged, was leading their weary steps to a land of liberty and peace.”¹¹

Successive generations of Wesleyan clergy and many Mfengu converts accepted as gospel Ayliff’s portrayal of the Mfengu as abject slaves longing to be freed from their cruel Gcaleka masters. According to Ayliff’s narrative, Gcaleka overlords held the Mfengu in a state of bondage, treating them like “dogs.” They tended Gcaleka cattle, milked their cows, cultivated and harvested their crops, and constructed their houses; in return, the Mfengu received only a pittance, milk and a few skins. Whenever any Mfengu were successful at growing their own crops, acquiring cattle, or selling skins, the Gcaleka would confiscate a sizable portion. This led the Mfengu to develop a “defensive armour of deception,” to carry on trading in secret and hiding their cattle in remote glens and kloofs or to mixing them with the herds of sympathetic neighbors.¹²

As some Mfengu began settling at Ayliff’s mission station and attending services, Hintsa began to feel that the missionaries were destabilizing his kingdom. On one occasion when he attended a church service with Mfengu in attendance, Ayliff claimed that Hintsa said: “This word may suit my dogs, the Fingos, but I and my people will not have it.”¹³ Relations between Hintsa and Ayliff continued to deteriorate until war broke out in December 1834 after warriors of two rival Xhosa chiefdoms, the Ndlambe and Ngqika, invaded white territory in the eastern Cape. During the war many more Mfengu began to settle at Butterworth and protected Ayliff’s home even after he was forced to leave the area in February 1835.

Mission societies were not of a single mind about the war. Missionaries of the London Missionary Society generally opposed it, while Wesleyan missionaries, along with British settlers, were vocal proponents. Ayliff, whose advocacy of British imperialism was both well established and doctrinally blessed, gathered intelligence on the movement of Gcaleka forces for the British. He actively lobbied British officials about the plight of Mfengu in the Gcaleka kingdom and the necessity for British support in their escape from bondage. When the British commander, Col. Harry Smith, promised that the British would help the Mfengu “at a befitting time,” Ayliff told his Mfengu supporters “that before long they would be under the shield of British protection and most probably removed from Kaffirland to the Colony.”¹⁴

At the time the British were on the verge of invading Hintsa’s Gcaleka kingdom and the Cape Colony’s governor, Benjamin D’Urban, was looking for justifications to prosecute the war across the Kei. Since slaves were being freed in the Cape Colony as well as throughout the British Empire on 1 December 1834, he seized the opportunity to proclaim that he was also liberating the Mfengu “from the very lowest and worst state of slavery.” As D’Urban phrased it, Mfengu emancipation conformed to “the true spirit of the sweeping emancipation so recently made by the Mother Country.”¹⁵ In keeping with the abolitionist argument that freed slaves would eventually be transformed into “free labor,” D’Urban anticipated that the Mfengu would become a reliable source of workers for white farmers who chronically complained about a shortage of black labor. The governor was able to cloak practical ends with humanitarian zeal.

After declaring war on the Gcaleka on 24 April 1835, D’Urban agreed to meet with members of a Mfengu delegation near Butterworth. They had come to ask for the king of England’s protection. On 3 May he issued Government Notice no. 14, which granted settlement rights to Mfengu refugees in an “uninhabited and worse than useless district” between the Fish and Lower Keiskamma Rivers and, to add to that magnanimous gesture, declared them British subjects. He described them as an “industrious, gentle, and well disposed tribe, good herdsman, good agriculturalists” and in an interesting turn of phrase, “useful servants.”¹⁶ For the Mfengu the offer amounted to trading one servitude for another. But for the governor it was a move to use the Mfengu not only as a buffer between European colonists and Xhosa groups but also as guides and fighters for the British in future wars of Xhosa dispossession.¹⁷

According to Ayliff’s account, when Hintsa heard his “dogs” had sought protection from the British, he ordered retribution against them. But Hintsa rescinded his order after D’Urban bluntly told him he would execute two of Hintsa’s entourage for every Mfengu he killed. D’Urban then offered sanctuary to the Mfengu and called on Ayliff to accompany refugees to land allocated for them near Fort Peddie.

The Exodus

Taking advantage of the offer, on 6 May 1835, Jonas Mayekiso Mgijima and his family joined the nearly seventeen thousand men, women, and children who took their belongings and over twenty thousand head of cattle (including cattle Gcaleka claimed were stolen from them) and flocks of goats and sheep on a trek across the Kei River. While a number of Mfengu stayed among the Xhosa, the majority accompanied Ayliff and his family and other missionaries and traders in wagons and formed a massive column with an escort of British troops in the rear. The column—described as eight miles in length and one and a half miles in breadth—took ten days to traverse the one hundred miles to a site near Fort Peddie. Even without the drama of pharaoh’s chariots in hot pursuit and the parting of the Red Sea, the parallel of the Mfengu exodus with that of the biblical Israelites was not lost on James Alexander, an aide to Harry Smith. “Nothing like this ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Promised Land
• 2. The Prophet’s Call
• 3. The Making of a Massacre
• 4. When People Rally Round the Word of God
• 5. The Bulhoek Aftermath
• 6. The Lost Ark
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index