What does our common history tell us? From Somerset East to KwaNojoli 

When the executive director of Jakes Gerwel Foundation, Theo Kemp, approached me with a proposal of collating the views of the name change in Somerset East, I was a little sceptical as to what purpose that would serve. He told me the process of the name change was fraught with what was clearly racial and ethnical tensions. He thought that allowing everyone to share their views might create an opportunity for social cohesion and better understanding between the people of this small historic town. As someone who had observed the antagonistic manners during the attempt to change the name of Cape Town International Airport, I was fearful. Then I recalled how during the book launches of my historical novels, people tended to mellow out once they understood the co-dependency of our respective identities, common history and geography. This gave me hope and courage to be a part of the project. Having been at Paulet House, the headquarters of the JGF in Somerset East/KwaNojoli, on a writer’s residence, I was no stranger to this small historical town. I had lamented how three weeks was not enough for me to sniff the town’s soul. I thought the interviews would provide me with ample opportunity to achieve this. I was not wrong. 

Most of us know the written history of Somerset East: how the then governor of the Cape Colony founded it, after clearing black tribes, to be the breadbasket of the colony in 1825. And named it after himself. That history is also written all over the town streets, named after his son, who was also one of the nasty and cruel characters of the Frontier era. The town was his playground, towing his harem of Khoisan women whom he treated as prostitutes and slaves. Say nothing of men he used as British colonial mercenaries. You hardly hear anything about black history, even though almost all first black intellectuals of the Eastern Cape, from Isaac Williams Wauchope to John Tengo Jabavu, had a working stint in the town. I must admit, this hidden history of the area hardly anyone knows or mentions interests me more. Some of its residue is left on the names of the natural landscape very few in our age knows the origins of. For instance, depending on who you ask, you get different names for the mountain on whose foot the town is situated: Bosberg, Khelelela, Nojoli, etc. 

The common lament of coloured and black Africans who grew up in the town is how the mountain falls ceased since they built dams on top of the mountain in the sixties. Others think the mountain became too forested and as such, though the falls are still present, they’re not visible because of the forest. I have explored the mountain a little. The cliff falls are dry. So the theory of dams on the summit holds more sway for me. The town is an oasis in the middle of the Karoo because of several fountains from the mountain. The townships, where people were moved after the forced removals from the former cosmopolitan area, then called The Plots, are segregated. The one populated by mostly black Africans is called Mnandi. A river called Mnandi runs through the town. It is now mostly dry during non-rainy seasons. Mnandi is the acronym of maz’amnandi meaning “tasteful waters”. The Xhosa name Khelelela is derived from the fact that people would go to the fountains to fetch water, pouring them from one pitch to another, a process in Xhosa called khelelela: You scoop water with a pitch, pour it into the one of the person behind you, who does the same to the one behind them until the pitch at the end is full. The process is repeated until everyone’s pitch is full. It is a wonderful system to watch in practise, and it is almost always accompanied with a song. It is faster than everyone flocking at the fountainhead to fill their own pitch, thus causing time-delaying congestion. Khelelelais a more humane system that is based on the spirit of ubuntu: You are a person through others. 

Abel Boyce Piki, the person who made it his lifelong task to change the name of Somerset East “back” to KwaNojoli, died on 9 September 2024, a week or so after we had finished recording the community interviews. In his interviews, he lets us into the difficult politics of the task and process from proposing the name change to the council meetings up to lobbying government departments and name-change councils. It’s an understatement to say the whole process now feels like it is operating under his tutelage. Oom Boyce, as he is known KwaNojoli, was also an imbongi in a true Xhosa sense of the word. He was not just a poet, but a keeper of the nation’s culture, history and identity, as well as a shaman and cultural healer.

Our interviews sought to cover the diverse views of the community. They were not aimed at promoting the name change, but to understand the dissenting views. Unfortunately the dissent had a racial and ethnic tinge, perhaps because they thought the name change promotes the Xhosa history over and above others: 

1. Waste of money that could have been better utilised for town development.
2. Just an excuse to give more corrupt tenders to friends.
3. Why couldn’t they just use a neutral name like Blue Crane?

The interviews, besides giving a historical background of who Nojoli was, also sought to put things in perspective about the neglect of our need for healing from our historical traumas. It is, of course, easy for the historical victors who never experienced any historical traumas; who, in telling the so-called official history, sought to wipe away the history of the defeated. The genocidal acts against the Khoikhoi and the clearance of the Zuurveld area by Colonel Graham to make way for the arrival of the 1820 settlers are treated as mere incidences of history and a bygone era. But, as they say, what the axe forgets, the tree remembers.

Similar dismissive arguments have been made against the name change of Cradock to Nxuba, a river that happens to traverse KwaNojoli, also as tributary called Little Fish River, starting from the Winterberg mountains. Ask any Xhosa person why Fish River is called that; they most probably do not know. But ask them why it is called Inxuba Yethemba and they will tell you a story about how in ancient times, especially during the times of drought and threatening famine, people would move to what they called amadlelo, the green grazing oases. Most of these oases ran along the fertile banks of Inxuba, hence amaXhosa called it Inxuba Yethemba: the fertile valley of hope. AmaXhosa kings used to settle in these fertile valleys, or station their great kraals, which would be looked after by the entourage from their great house. King Ngqika’s settlement when the white people began pouring into the Cape was at the banks of the Tyhume River to Qab’ Imbola, the present-day town of Hogsback. Nkosi Ngqika’s father was Mlawu, who died with his father Rharhabe in a skirmish with Abathembu during the late 18^th century before he could take the reins of kingship. 

Ngqika’s father kept idlelo in the foot of Khelelela’s Mountain with his great wife known as Yese. Most historians know the name of Yese from the historical writings of J.H. Soga, who had finished the project started by his father, Tiyo Zisani Soga. If you vary your sources, you will also read from the journals of John Barrow titled An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798. Barrow had newly arrived from China on British official business when he passed through and travelled our country. He was lucky enough to be given an audience with the young king Ngqika. Because young kings tended to be under the influential command of their mothers, Ngqika’s mother was the one who made a stronger impression on Barrow. He is the one who tells us that everyone called Ngqika’s mother Nojoli because of her fun and bubbly personality. To forge closer relationship with the newly arrived white people, and in order to learn their ways, Nojoli married someone who today is regarded, for better or worse, as one of the founders of the Afrikaner nation. AmaXhosa knew this man as Khula, because of his tall stature. In the history books, he is known as Coenraad de Buys. Nojoli was not only king Ngqika’s mother but one of the wives of De Buys.

Despite our pretensions, our histories and identities are more interlinked than we care to admit. Until we learn to use that as our strength rather than what divides us, we will continue mourning our past instead of celebrating our history. And perhaps if we mourn together what needs to be mourned, we might also find enough empathy to understand the legitimacy of calls for setting things in order based on justice. Only then perhaps we shall stop being angry with each other and begin healing from our historical traumas. 

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

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Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a South African author living in Cape Town. His debut novel The Broken River Tent won the University of Johannesburg Debut Novel Prize in 2019. He worked with the drama department of Rhodes University on two plays he wrote for the South African National Arts Festival about Maqoma and his half-brother Sandile, both of whom had been Xhosa chiefs. He has a passionate interest in South Africa’s frontier history and the wars of land dispossession. His most recent novel The Wanderers was published in 2021.

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