A teenage girl's prophecy led the Xhosa to slaughter their own cattle

In 1856, a Xhosa girl named Nongqawuse said ancestral spirits had promised that if the Xhosa killed their cattle and burned their crops, the dead would rise and drive out British colonists. Hundreds of thousands of cattle were slaughtered on faith. The famine that followed killed tens of thousands of Xhosa and broke their ability to resist colonial rule.

— J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7 — Indiana University Press, 1989
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