In April 1856, a
young girl from the Xhosa tribe named Nongqawuse walked with a friend to the
banks of the Gxarha River, near the Indian Ocean. This was in an area that is
now the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The two girls met two men who claimed to
be ancestor spirits bringing a message from their ancestors: The Xhosa dead
will rise up and lead the people into an era of freedom and prosperity.
In order for this
to happen, the strangers explained, the Xhosa people would have to abandon all
of their old ways. They specifically said that witchcraft, sorcery, and sexual
promiscuity had to be ended. The Xhosa people were to dedicate their time to
building new pens for cattle and new fields for the new crops that would
suddenly spring forth with the arrival of their spirit ancestors.
There was one catch
to this. The Xhosa were a people who depended primarily on cattle and the
growing of crops to feed their cattle. The prophecy passed to Nongqawuse
stipulated that the new era of prosperity would only come when the Xhosa killed
all of their cattle and destroyed the means with which to raise them. This
great leap of faith is what would usher in the triumph of their people.
“The Xhosa example is a good reminder that when powerful people come to
believe insane things, they will try to impose that insanity on their people.”
Incredibly, the
Xhosa people, upon hearing this tale from Nongqawuse and her friend, embarked
on a campaign of killing their cattle. Not everyone was convinced that this was
the right thing to do, but many accepted the prophecy, mostly because important
members of the tribe had said they accepted it. This validation from people in
authority was enough to convince them the prophecy was real.
Nongqawuse
predicted that the prophecy would be fulfilled on Feb. 18, 1857, when the sun
would turn red. This did not happen, so Chief Sarili went to the river to visit
with the girls and came back convinced they got the date wrong. The prophecy
would come true in eight days, so the people had better get cracking on the
cattle killing in order to be ready for the great transition to the glorious
future.
The result of this
lunacy was that 80 percent of the population died from the subsequent famine
caused by the cattle killing. It seems incredible to modern people that a
population would try to commit suicide because a teenage girl claimed she saw
the future, but we live in an age in which Greta Thunberg is treated like a
prophet by the environmental movement. She is our Nongqawuse.
The general
consensus as to why this happened is that the Xhosa people were under a great
deal of pressure from other tribes as well as the white man. The Boers and the
British were a great technological challenge, but they also brought new
disease, like the “lung sickness” that affected Xhosa cattle. For a primitive
people, it surely must have seemed like they were cursed in some way.
That was what made
Nongqawuse possible. She gave the men in charge of her people something they
desperately wanted to hear. Their status and authority were under pressure, as
they had no answers for the challenges they faced. Nongqawuse provided a way to
resolve those fears and anxieties. The prophecy gave the leaders purpose and
the authority to compel their people to act on the prophecy.
This provides some
insight into what is going on with the political elites of the West and their
embrace of the cult of climate change. Consider the flamboyant Secretary of
Transportation for the Biden administration, Pete Buttigieg. He spends his days
preaching about electric cars and how they will free us from the shackles of
fossil fuels, even though he has no idea how this will work or if it can work.
It is not even
clear that he believes in Gaia or that she is vexed at your lawnmower, but
believing the climate-change prophecies solves a problem for him. When you are
sure Gaia is angry at Western man for his racism and lawnmowers, but you are
impotent to do anything about it, believing in the mysteries of electric cars
is a nice escape. Instead of being a meaningless placeholder in government,
Pete Buttigieg is a bringer of hope.
You get a whiff of
this from European leaders when they talk about the looming natural-gas
shortage this winter. They often talk about it as a necessary step in the
transition to what they call renewable energy, a thing that does not exist. It
is as if they are stimulated at the thought of people huddled in the dark,
getting what heat they can from burning the last of their furniture.
The job of the
green apparatchik in the E.U. is to persuade the people to overcome their fear
of cold showers in winter. They imagine themselves one day on those
Soviet-style posters, striking a heroic pose as they lead their people away
from the land of smokestacks and warm houses to the glorious future. What lies
ahead does not matter as the crusade gives the dreary functionaries a reason to
live.
If the only result
of this strange cult that has gripped so many of the ruling class resulted in
nothing more than weird public statements, no one need care. The Xhosa example
is a good reminder that when powerful people come to believe insane things,
they will try to impose that insanity on their people. This is what we are
seeing in the West as the greens try to roll back the last three centuries of
technological progress.
Interestingly, the
failure of the prophecies did not wake the Xhosa people up to the fraud that
was being perpetrated on them by their leaders. When the dates came and went,
the believers simply turned on the nonbelievers, blaming their lack of faith
for the prophecies not being fulfilled. Again, this is something we see with
the environmental movements in the West. Your lack of faith is the real
problem.
The example of the
Xhosa is something to keep in mind as we see the greens implement their agenda.
The collapse of Sri Lanka due to the embrace of green agriculture, which
collapsed the economy, does not register. The revolt of Dutch farmers over what
is literally a cattle-killing scheme is not causing anyone in charge to
reconsider their plans. For the zealots, none of this matters.
This is what
happens when fanatics are put in charge. They have no internal mechanism to
reconsider their fanaticism, so they go as far as reality will let them and
then they are destroyed. When the fanatics are put in charge of a society, they
take that society with them into the abyss of their fanaticism. The suffering
we see coming from green policies is, to the believers, proof that the policies
are working.
One final lesson
from the Xhosa is that after the death of 80 percent of their people, the
remainder did not turn on the remaining believers. In fact, the location of the
prophecy is still called the Valley of Nongqawuse. The skeptics were called
“the stingy ones” for their unwillingness to sacrifice their cattle to the
cause. It is not hard to imagine something similar in the ruins of the West.
Those who warned about the dangers will be remembered as the deniers by the
people in the Valley of Greta.
The Valley of Greta
- Taki's Magazine - Taki's Magazine (takimag.com)
