Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People

"In the 1850s, in despair after sixty years of disastrous wars and British betrayals that had cost them most of their ancestral lands, the Xhosa--South Africa's most important and sophisticated black nation--gave way to a strange and dangerous teaching. Prophets among them declared that salvation lay in killing all their cattle, their most prized possession, and destroying all their food stocks. If they did this, the prophets said, on a certain day everything would be returned to them by supernatural agency and in much greater abundance--huge new herds, copious supplies of grain, and the white man would be expelled from the lands he had stolen." "The herds were slaughtered, the appointed day came, and passed; thousands of Xhosa starved to death." "Yet these cataclysmic events were in fact, as Noel Mostert makes vividly clear in Frontiers, only the cruel climax of a far larger history that had begun hundreds of years before with the slow migration of Xhosa ancestors out of Central Africa toward the Cape, and the coming of the earliest Portuguese explorers in search of a route to India.