The Xhosa way of life was permanently disrupted by military conquest and white territorial encroachment; severe social disruption was also introduced by their conversion to Christianity. The earliest missionaries to the Cape Nguni settled in Xhosa territory. In 1799 Ngqika granted Dr J.T. van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society permission to work among his people. Van der Kemp studied the language, assembled an extensive vocabulary of Xhosa words, and began to teach his pupils to write, but he withdrew to minister to the Coloured community at Bethelsdorp after little over a year amongst the Xhosa people. He was succeeded in 1816 by Joseph Williams, who also took up residence with Ngqika’s permission, but who died after only two years in 1818. John Brownlee led the first permanent mission to Ngqika territory in 1820; his associate at Tyhume, John Bennie, completed the first systematic transcription of the Xhosa language, which was printed for the first time in December 1823. Christian missionaries of various (often competing) persuasions worked, for good or ill, at converting the Xhosa-speaking peoples, and introduced a radical social rift between those who converted to the new religion, the amakholwa or amagqobhoka, and those who continued in their traditional way of life and precolonial beliefs. The Xhosa favoured red ochre as a cosmetic, smearing it on their faces and bodies, and on the skins they wore as cloaks and skirts. Later, they smeared ochre on the blankets they took in trade with white settlers and adopted as garments. The Christian missionaries insisted that their converts lay aside these traditional practices and adopt European fashions of dress and patterns of behaviour. The lexicographer Albert Kropf, himself a missionary, reflected the European ethnocentric bias in his definition of iqaba (a derivative of the verb ukuqaba, to paint or smear the body with red clay) as “One who habitually paints himself with ochre; fig. an ignorant person, a heathen” (see further the comment on the title of poem 8 in the Notes below). Red-blanketed people continued to practise male circumcision, their marriageable children continued to dance the intlombe (condemned as licentious by missionaries and defined by Pahl as “a traditional weekend entertainment of young men and girls of their age group where the men dance to the accompaniment of the girls’ singing and clapping; this lasts all night”) and they continued to appeal to their ancestors, who were ever-present as shades or spirits. The Xhosa believed in Qamata, an ill-defined supreme being; the dead ancestors could be invoked in poetry and prayer and with beer to intercede with Qamata on behalf of the living.
To a large extent the Xhosa initially resisted missionary teaching, though this was not the case for the Mfengu, Zulu refugees who had settled among them (see the note to the title of poem 66). The power and authority of the chiefs was broken, however, and Xhosa incorporation into the white economy was facilitated, not only by war and conquest, not only by conversion to Christianity, but also by the disastrous millenarian cattle-killing episode of 1856-7 (see Peires 1989), enflamed by the visions of the teenage girl Nongqawuse, and by the discovery of diamonds in 1866 and gold in the following decade. Xhosa joined Mfengu in the schools, especially at the premier mission institution of Lovedale, founded in 1841, where they were given a Victorian education alongside the sons and daughters of missionaries. A new Principal of Lovedale revised the educational syllabus in 1870, withdrawing Greek and Hebrew and mathematics in favour of book-binding and wagon-making, but by then an African elite had already been established in the Cape. They contributed to the Lovedale newspaper Indaba and its successor Isigidimi sama Xosa, and, when Isigidimi failed in the face of competition from independent black newspapers, they contributed to the Mfengu-oriented Imvo zabantsundu in King William’s Town and its Xhosa-Thembu rival Izwi labantu in East London (see Opland 1998 chapter 11). The black vote was mobilised by these newspapers, and black political organisations were established, the Native Educational Association in 1879, Imbumba yamanyama in 1882, the South African Native Congress in 1898 and, most significantly, the South African Native National Congress in 1912 (see Odendaal). The quest for independence within the structures introduced by Europeans found expression too in the formation towards the end of the 19th century of breakaway African independent churches (see the note to 49: 15), which came to be known collectively as the Ethiopian churches.
The discovery of mineral wealth contributed to inevitable conflict between the Boer republics, on whose land the minefields lay, and the British colonial government, which ruled the Cape province and Natal. After the war, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, peace was followed by the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 with a constitution that placated Boer sentiment and largely ignored African representations. Gold had been discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, and the city that became Johannesburg rapidly mushroomed. The inland mining industry that developed was fed by black migrant labour, recruited from the rural areas. The gold mines tended to attract African males as migrants; there were relatively few African women on the Rand initially: “only 14 per cent of Africans—and less than seven per cent of African women (approximately 147,000)—were living in the urban areas by 1921. African women, by far the largest racial group among women, were thus the least urbanised of any sex-race category” (Walker 11). The numbers of African women had doubled in the years immediately after the First World War: in 1918 there were only 67, 111 African women on the Rand. Nontsizi Mgqwetho may have moved from the eastern Cape to the Rand in this period. Certainly she was involved in an anti-pass protest at the Johannesburg Fort on 3 April 1919, as her contribution to Umteteli on 13 December 1924 testifies (item 54), and may have been arrested at some time (Sasakuva sesibanjwa ngamadindala, Next thing we knew the cops had the cuffs on us, 12: 14). Why she came to Johannesburg is not clear. Bonner, citing Gaitskell, notes that in this period “two broad categories of women came to be settled in the towns: firstly, those coming unattached or fleeing from their homes, who became domestic servants, washerwomen or prostitutes, or took up illicit liquor selling to earn an income; secondly, the wives and daughters of families of those who came to settle permanently in town” (278). From her poetry it is abundantly evident that she was an independent-minded woman. She describes herself as ungainly and physically unattractive, and suggests she is unmarried:
Taru! Dadakazi lendada ze Afrika
Ub’hib’hinxa lwentombi esinqe sibi
Awu! Nontsizi bulembu e Afrika
Akusoze wende nezinto zigoso.
Mercy, duck of the African thickets,
ungainly girl with ill-shaped frame.
Oh Nontsizi, African moss,
with bow-legs like yours you’ll never marry! (13: 33-36)
Her first poem was submitted from Crown Mines to the southwest of the burgeoning urban complex; she might have been in domestic service in a white household on the mine, although early domestic servants tended to be black males or white females. She may have been uncomfortable in her situation: Awu ndakubeka ndibheka emlungwini, Oh I blundered in going to whites! (12: 16). Twice she writes poems after earthquakes hit Johannesburg, on 1 December 1923 and 6 December 1924 (poems 9 and 52), which suggests that she stayed on in Johannesburg for at least a few years.
An invaluable nugget of biographical information can be gleaned from Nontsizi’s only English article, located by Ntongela Masilela. On 15 December 1923 Umteteli carried a revisionist account of the murder of the Voortrekker Piet Retief and his party by the Zulu king Dingana (“one of the bravest Kings who ever sat on the Native throne”) on 16 December 1838. The article was written by Elizabeth Mgqwetto, who is described as “The well-known and talented Poetess.” In another item located by Masilela, R.V. Selope Thema referred to the anti-pass protest organised by Congress in April 1919, noting the involvement of “Miss Nontsizi Mgqwetho