What Are Examples Of Passive Resistance Movement

When she returned she said that she had seen a man, who had told her that 'The whole community would rise from the dead; that all cattle now living must be slaughtered'. The girls returned home and told their families what had happened but they were not believed. Later, however, when Nongqawuse described one of the men, her uncle Mhalakaza, himself a diviner, recognised the description as that of his dead brother, and became convinced she was telling the truth.
As a result, between April 1856 and June 1857, the various sections of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape and the Transkei slaughtered almost all their enormous stocks of cattle and deliberately killed their crops. This apocalyptic event, rather than being some kind of 'mass suicide's described by early colonial historians, was actually the earliest example of a mass 'passive resistance' movement in South Africa. The themes and symbols of the Cattle-Killing can be found in the various resistance movements of South Africa right into the modern era.
Nongqawuse and Mhalakaza said that those who had appeared to them were the spirits of their dead ancestors, who had come back to life in order to bring the Xhosa nation back to its former glory and to 'render the Xhosa the assistance they required in order to drive the …show more content…
Although not intrinsically an anti-European movement, the Xhosa Cattle-Killing can be seen as an assertion of black identity. Steve Biko coined the slogan 'Black man, you are on your own' for his philosophy of Black Consciousness, and likewise, whites were simply ignored in the prophecies of Mhalakaza and Nongqawuse - they had no part to play in the New World of the Xhosa. Western Christian images were adapted by the Cattle-Killing prophets for their own ends and incorporated into a specifically black world picture, which also drew on the rich seam of traditional Xhosa culture and the image of an idealised