HIST 382 Chapter reading: Reading A Great Debate about Nongqaquse's Era
23 Jan 2019
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Document Summary
South africa"s historiographical tradition is characterised by the absence of black historians and this is its central weakness. There is the focus on one historian, mbaba, son of gquoba. He was based at his alma mater, the premier mission school of lovedale teaching translation skills and editing a monthly christian newspaper. The mid-1800s were harsh times in the eastern cape and its frontier zones - there were cattle diseases that were exacerbated by a three year drought and killed 100,000 cattle in the transkei alone. There was a famine and about 1/3 of black political elite was disenfranchised. In 1850, after the xhosa were defeated their country was colonized and a millenarian movement erupted. Gqoba"s primary antagonist was charles brownlee a colonial official during nongqawuse"s era and later as well. He had been very involved in the colonization of xhosaland. Gquoba denounced frances brownlee and was convinced that war plots were a colonial invention.
