The PROPHETESS Who Led Her Tribe to DEATH

Nongqawuse had a fatal charisma. She was so smooth-tongued that she led an entire South African tribe to oblitearion. And she was just 14 years old.
On hot, still day in 1856 she sat on a rock overlooking a pool in the Gxara River and, as she stared at the placid water, she imagined she saw faces reflected there. She ran back to her village and told the elders of her tribe, the Gcaleka Xhosas, that she had seen the faces of her ancestors and tole they had spoken to her. They had told her that they were ready to resurrected to lead a holy war againts the Europeans who were taking over their country.
But, said Nongqawuse, the ancestors would only return to earth at a price. The tribe would first have to proove their faith by destroying all their worldly wealth. They would have to burn their crops and slaughter all their cattle - otherwise they would be turned into reptiles and insects and destroyed in a tempest.
February 18, 1857, was the appointed day on which the ancestral dead would be reborn to fight again. The Gcaleka Xhosas met the deadline. They spent almost a year taking part in a prolonged orgy of ceremonial massacre and destruction.
Eventually the great day arrived. The hungry tribes folk rose early for fear of missing the promised miracle. Nongqawuse told them to watch the sun rise and to chart its progress across the sky. It would, she predicted, halt in the heavens - then retrace its course to set for the first time in the east. Throughout the day, the sun continued on its inevitable course. Tribes people, half blinded trough staring at it, wailed in despair. And, as the sun died in the west, their despair turn to anger. Even hungrier that they had been at dwan, they peered around for the young prophetess - but she had fled.
Nongqawuse sought sanctuary with the British in King William's Town. They placed her, for her own protection, on Robben Island. Later she moved secretly to Eastern Province, where she lived on a farm until her death in 1898.
The tribe she had led to ruin were not so lucky. They had no food, nor the means of providing themselves with any. Though many were helped by neighbouring tribes and European charity, 25,000 died of starvation.