Nguni

Abstract

These parallel texts reflect obliquely on the various histories of Nguni cattle in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. The histories are exemplified in the story of the Xhosa Cattle Killing of 1856–57, in which the Xhosa, reeling from several wars with the British and beset by severe drought and the catastrophic spread of European bovine lung disease, heed the prophecy of the girl Nongqawuse and kill their cattle so that the British might be “driven back into the sea”. The story has gripped historians and writers of every stripe, but its cultural and political import is fiercely contested. My texts gesture not only at “contamination” as historical, political, genetic and metaphorical, but also at the different ways in which “history” is constructed.

Keywords

• bos taurus africanus
• cattle killing
• contamination
• fiction-as-research
• nguni cattle
• nongqawuse
• practice-led research
• south africa
• transkei