Dispelling myths of Maqoma as a warmonger
The beginning of the 19th century, as Unity Movement intellectual and leader I.B. Tabata , suggested in a letter written to Nelson Mandela in June 1948, “closed a chapter in our history
— the end of the resistance of the Blacks by military means”.
Tabata, writing the letter to Mandela in his capacity as the President of the ANC Youth League, the year the National Party came to power, drew a distinction between two phases of struggle.
The first, consisting of successive military contests between the African people and the English colonisers, alongside of course other skirmishes with Boer forces.
The second, was what Tabata suggested was “the political form of struggle”. Jongumsobomvu Maqoma belongs without doubt, to the first of the two phases. However, to neatly place him in the terrain of war by force of arms alone, is to overlook Jongumsobomvu the statesman, early African nationalist and freedom fighter, who was as adept in dialogue as in the ambushes in war, that defined his life as a leader.
“Without question, Maqoma was the most renowned Xhosa chief in SA’s 19th century frontier wars”, reads the page on Jongumsobomvu in the SA History Online. Indeed, oral history and a litany of missionary and colonial accounts reveal a life story of a sophisticated, cunning, and ever-defiant military leader and statesman. Maqoma was not only renowned for his military prowess and perfection of the art of guerrilla warfare in many skirmishes with colonial forces, but also because the mere mention of his name remains associated with the defence of African land in the face of colonial dispossession.
It is the ongoing and perennial struggle of Black people and Africans in particular, to restore what the earlier dispossession of land prior to the Land Bills of the early 20th century gave rise to, which continues to make relevant the name, memory, and legacy of Maqoma in the contemporary political sphere, 150 years after his passing.
The militarisation of the legacy of Maqoma, serves the function of positioning him as a ‘man of war’, frenzied by its ebb and flow, rather than as someone who pursued war under conditions not of his own choosing, but those imposed on him by colonial advance. When we speak of the 150 years of conflict on the frontier, and the nine wars, it is to recognise Maqoma’s leadership in at least three of these wars — in 1834, 1846 and 1850.
It is thus, that when we speak of a 100-year resistance in the Eastern Cape, it is so interwoven with the life of Jongumsobomvu, that it is the same as to speak of him.
For it was Jongumsobomvu among others, who understood the inextricably material link between the ceding of lands (used for spiritual, sustenance and lineage reproduction purposes) and the weakening of the resistance of his people to British imperialism. Viewed in this way, Maqoma’s exploits in war, were not just the frenzied acts of a warmonger as many colonial and missionary accounts suggest but were part of a ‘national struggle’ for land, bread and peace.
British foreign policy expert, Lawrence Freedman suggests in a recent article, that “in any war, the ability of an economy to sustain the war effort and the resilience of the logistical systems to ensure that supplies reach the front lines as needed, is of increasing importance as conflicts wear on”.
Maqoma intimately understood this. This is why when a ‘peace’ was struck under the Stockenstrom system in the 1830s, Maqoma used the opportunity to strengthen crop cultivation and cattle rearing among the Rharhabe communities west of the Keiskamma and the Tyhume rivers.
Furthermore, as Timothy Stapleton’s book on Jongumsobomvu suggests, he displayed in his interactions with various missionaries, “a keen intellectual interest in acquiring new medical, military and agricultural technology”, rather than solely engaging them to better understand his military adversaries.
His was not an agent of aimless military aggression, but combined military and diplomatic interventions in pursuit of the material and spiritual restoration of all that his people had lost. Maqoma and his amaJingqi were not marauding rebels as some suggested, but patriots with a just commitment to a struggle passed on to them by their forefathers since the earliest days of the first conflict between amaXhosa and the British in the Zuurveld.
If we understand Maqoma as this multifaceted pragmatist, as comfortable in the Waterkloof forests with his battle contingent, as he was holding rank with low-ranking British officers in a Fort Beaufort canteen over a glass of brandy, then we are to memorialise him as a fighter of contemporary relevance. He was many things, but what he gave us as a valuable inheritance, is the recognition unlike Tabata, that the struggle while having gone through phases defined by distinct tactical choices, remained the struggle nonetheless.
Seen in this way, it is to speak of Jongumsobomvu looking over the existing land hunger among citizens as a sign that the struggle that took Maqoma to Robben Island twice, remains a struggle we are confronted with. One hundred and fifty years later our task is to prioritise the ‘fighting legacy’ of a man whose understanding of war and peace, was much more sophisticated than his adversaries would allow for in how they wrote him into a history that was not of his own making.
Our task is to historicise Jongumsobomvu in a “people’s history” that takes his memory and example, as a call to struggle to resolve the unresolved, to restore that which is yet to be restored in full.
Aah Jongumsobomvu!
Our task is to historicise Jongumsobomvu in a people’s history that takes his memory and example, as a call to struggle to resolve the unresolved, to restore that which is yet to be restored in full