A Xhosa prophet asked the tribe to destroy cattle and crops to defeat the British. The tribe almost died for it!

The Xhosa wars, aka: Cape Frontier War, were a series of nine wars between the Xhosa people and European settlers from 1779 to 1879, in what is now Eastern Cape in South Africa.

In April 1856, a 16 year old prophetess declared that the Xhosla people’s ancestors promised to alleviate their hardships by descending from the afterlife, driving all Europeans into the sea, and giving the Xhosa gifts of horses, sheep, goats, dogs, fowls, etc if and only if they first destroyed all sources of nutrition.

Desperate and tired, the Xhosla killed off all their cattle and burned their crops. The ancestors were supposed to do arrive on 18 February 1857, but alas, they failed to deliver their promise.

Rather than the utopia that was predicted, famine set in and led to the starvation of thousands. The remainder of the Xhosa nation was forced to turn to colonists for food, blankets, and water which enabled to the colonists to remain in power.