n April 1856, an orphaned Xhosa teenage girl, Nongqawuse, was scaring birds from crops near the Gxara River in today’s Eastern Cape district of Centane when two ‘strangers’ (ancestors) allegedly appeared and issued her with an instruction. She was to tell the Xhosa people that if they sacrificed their cattle and grain while abandoning witchcraft, their ancestors would rise from the dead and sweep the white settlers and the Mfengu
