Episode 199 - Cognitive Dissonance, Desiccated Hags, a Trail of Tears and Ssehura Baartman

History of South Africa podcast

Episode 199, cognitive dissonance, desiccated hags, a Trail of Tears and Ssehura Baartman — Almost two hundred episodes exploring a land rich with some of the earliest examples of human habitation.
We need to assess what has happened — standing back a bit to view the scene from where we’ve arrived - 1853 in the main with a smattering of 1854. The amaXhosa had lost a great deal of land to the English Settlers, the Coloureds, Khoe and Boers, as well as the amaMfengu refugees who were allies of the colonists. The coloureds and Khoekhoe had then lost some of their land to the colonists post 8th Frontier War. Each epoch saw a tussle over the territory.
AmaXhosa chiefs realised by the mid-Nineteenth century that they were fighting for survival. A semblance of joint understanding was starting to spread out from southern AFrica into the interior, but not in the sense of any co-ordinated response to a colonial threat. The vast majority of African chiefdoms facing expanding settler frontiers were still responding locally, their response fragmented because the vast majority of African chiefs still regarded each other as more dangerous enemies - so their joint response to this growing threat was haphazard.
AS the first people’s faced annhilation, what distinguished the amaXhosa in a kind of historical contradiction, is that they did not diminish the numbers after each pushback — their numbers actually increased. This is not what happened to the Khoe and San who were pushed off their land by the new arrivals, the Nguni, then the next arrivals, the Europeans. The First people’s of south Africa almost disappeared from the landscape as they were defeated.
Not so the amaXhosa.
Last episode I spoke of the historical Doppler Effect, and how folks approach the past, and this episode it’s Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance theory. A simple example of this is that when people smoke, and they know smoking causes cancer, they are in a state of cognitive dissonance. The behaviour is smoking, and knowing it causes cancer is the cognitive dissonance bit when they continue to puff away.
When Individuals form a group try to avoid disharmony by seeking consistency in beliefs. This is a central tenant to being human.
However, it was this basic principle that was going to lead to the coming Cattle Killing extravaganza. Mlanjeni’s prophecy continued — despite the fact that he had failed in his mission, he had not failed in his message.
It is not a surprise therefore to hear that the next complex prophet in our tale of magic and mystery hailed from southern Transkei, and lived alongside the Gxara River which is just north of the Great Kei River Mouth.
This is a place I know well, having regularly hiked from the Kei mouth Ferry along the beach to a nearby place called Qholora near the Ngogwane River in the mid-1980s. The riverine bush here is thick, mysterious, ancient and haunting. It seeps into your consciousness like the fingers of God, prodding your imagination, assailing your senses with sight and sound — and smell.
The reason for spending time on the flora is because the next character to emerge in this saga who is going to alter South African history was a young Xhosa girl, Nongqawuse. It is these sights and sounds, this landscape that etched into her mind because it was from inside this landscape from bushes growing near her village, two strangers would appear in a bush and tell her that salvation for the Xhosa lay in killing all their cattle.