Enoch Mgijima, leader of the Israelite sect which was responsible for the unrest at Bulhoek outside Queenstown in the eastern Cape in 1920 to 1922. Police killed many of the members of the sect and Mgijima and some of his followers were charged with stoking unrest. Found guilty, they were sentenced to six years’ forced labour, but were released in 1923. Upon his release, Mgijima laid the cornerstone of a large church in Queenstown. He died in 1928.
In 1921 and 1922 the Smuts government also took harsh action against black people on two occasions. The first of these involved a black sect, the Israelites, under the leadership of Enoch Mgijima, who squatted at Ntabelanga near Bulhoek in the Queenstown area of the eastern Cape. The Israelites, numbering about 1 000, used to gather there to celebrate Passover, but in 1920 they erected a tabernacle and some huts without registering themselves or paying tax. Whites and blacks in the area protested to government that members of the sect were allowing their cattle to graze on neighbouring land, but these protests fell on deaf ears. In an explanation heavily infused with millenarian overtones, Mgijima insisted that he had had a vision that the end of the world was at hand and that Jehovah had instructed him to remain there.
Various attempts in December 1920 by the police, the government and moderate black leaders to persuade the Israelites to move failed to produce results. Mgijima requested that Smuts himself should negotiate with the sect but Smuts refused to do so. In response to the growing militancy of the sect a police unit of about 800 men was sent to Bulhoek in May 1921. The police issued an ultimatum demanding that the Israelites evacuate the area and warning that if they failed to comply, their leader would be arrested and their homes demolished. Undaunted, the Israelites replied that Jehovah would fight on their side.
Soon afterwards they launched an attack armed with clubs, assegais and swords. They were fired upon by the police and more than 180 people were killed and 100 wounded. The government refused to set up a commission of inquiry. In the consequent trial of Enoch Mgijima and his ‘prophets’ the judge came to the conclusion that the tragedy had been unavoidable but that the government had given the Israelites a false sense of confidence by waiting such a long time before acting. The management of the incident did Smuts’s personal image a great deal of harm and his enemies later referred to him as the ‘butcher of Bulhoek’.
The Israelites should not be seen as a totally isolated group. They were part of the movement of Ethiopian or Independent black churches in South Africa. They also represented black resistance towards white dominance, and their belief in an apocalyptic solution underscores the millenarian nature of the movement.
Millenarianism is often the last resort of desperate people. These outbursts can be seen as a reaction against a steady tightening of white control in the ‘native areas’, running in tandem with greater industrialisation and increasing demands for cheap migrant labour from these areas for the Witwatersrand in particular.
The next year the government used excessive force once again – this time against the Bondelswarts, a group of mixed racial origin in the then South West Africa (Namibia). The Bondelswarts rebellion was the result of grievances that arose during the time of the German occupation. When South Africa was granted a mandate over South West Africa in 1919, the Bondelswarts were confident that their tribal status would be restored, that they would regain their lost land and that their leaders who were living in exile would be permitted to return and once again assume their positions of authority. None of these hopes was realised. Indeed, the South African government imposed further restrictive measures on the Bondelswarts, including a dog tax.
Conflicts erupted when two exiled leaders, J. Christian and A. Morris, returned to the community and were arrested by the police. The Bondelswarts resisted when the police tried to take Morris into custody. A force of 370 men advanced against the group and military aircraft started to bomb the Bondelswarts into submission. With the loss of only two people, the military force killed 115 Bondelswarts, including some women and children. The Bondelswarts had no option but to surrender.
Another religious ‘prophet’ appeared on the scene during the 1920s in the person of Wellington Buthelezi. Buthelezi was under the influence of Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s doctrines propagating the ‘back to Africa’ notion in America. Buthelezi began to preach in the Transkei in 1925, telling blacks that on the Day of Judgment black Americans would drop glowing coals out of aeroplanes to free blacks from their oppressors. To ensure their deliverance, blacks were advised to paint their houses black and slaughter their pigs.
In 1930 the government introduced stricter measures against resistancE groups. The Riotous Assemblies Amendment Act of that year made the incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence and also made provision for the banishment of political leaders from a district if it was found that they were disturbing public peace and order. While these movements had no visible impact, their importance lies in the fact that they draw our attention to often hidden resistance in the rural areas. It counters the notion that black resistance was exclusively an urban phenomenon.
