The Curse of Makhanda

An ironic nemesis

Grahamstown was once the most important post on the Cape colonial frontier. Today it is a failing town, but remains an important landmark on today’s rhetorical frontiers.

In 2018, it was renamed Makhanda, after a rebel and prophet of the 19^th century frontier wars. It was part of a sweeping plan to rid the Eastern Cape province of its colonial legacy, and the deprivations and inequalities associated with it.

But irony of ironies, the same year that the town was renamed, almost every municipal system failed. Naturally, these things take many years of neglect, but like landslides and market crashes, these things happen slowly, then all at once.

Despite the region’s high rainfall, water shortages are now commonplace, and sewage runs in the streets. Poverty deepens each year, as the talented and ambitious of the province leave for the great metropoles in the north, east and west.

There is an almost supernatural irony to this.

Makhanda is to me one of the greatest ironic stories in the history of our country, not just because of the tragedy of the collapse of one of the most beautiful towns in out country, but because of  the man after whom the town was renamed.

Makhanda, born in 1780 in what is now the Uitenhage area around Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), and joined the ranks of the recently converted religious leaders such as Ntsikana, and began to denounce polygamy, and the use of magic and witchcraft.

Nxele (left) and Ntsikana (right)

Ntsikana was a contemporary, and the first native convert among the Xhosa to embrace and spread the Gospel in a significant way. He is responsible for translating the name of God in the Bible to the name uThixo (the Xhosa creator god) in Xhosa language preaching, and it remains the name in use today.

Makhanda was also a prophet, but turned away from Christianity in 1816 out of hatred of the white settlers. He became an advisor to several local chieftains, and eventually raised his own anticolonial following with a new religion, which inverted Christianity, and embraced witchcraft again.

He called uThixo the "god of the whites", and said all should worship a new god called Mdalidiphu, the "god of the deeps", the enemy of the Christian god. He launched several attacks on the settlers, starting by attacking chiefs who cooperated with the colonial authorities, such as Ngqika. Seizure of cattle as punishment for this violence was used to raise greater resistance, and his confederates eventually marched on Grahamstown.

As he stormed the town with 6000 men, women and children in tow to seed the settlement as soon as they captured it, Makhanda promised his followers that they would sweep the white man into the ocean, that their bullets would turn to water. Instead, a Khoi chieftain called Jan Boesak rallied to the settlers and the rebellion was put down.

Imprisoned on Robben Island, Makhanda made an attempt to swim to freedom. He drowned in the ocean, a nemesis to his vain curse upon the white man.

And yet the prophetic significance seems to be largely lost on Makhanda’s contemporary admirers. Advocate Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, advisor to the Presidency on land reform, has called for the fulfillment of the prophet’s genocidal mandate (of course, “it’s just a metaphor”), and the confiscation of all property, moveable and immovable, from anybody with insufficient quantities of African blood.

If the prophecy is to be fulfilled at all, it seems that the recurrent ironic punishment associated with the name of Makhanda is not an outcome to be desired.

Today, the memorial to his attempted revenge on the colonial authorities lies disused, vandalised and neglected. But the memorial hosts an epitaph in mosaic which tells us in local idiom that which the spiteful advisors to the president should do well to heed:

“Ukuza kuka Nxele [to raise Makhanda/Nxele]: Something that will never happen”