Millenarian Modernism in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save

Abstract

This essay takes as its starting point the final scene of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s The Girl who Killed to Save (1935). Ostensibly an account of ‘Nongqause the Liberator,’ the prophet behind the Cattle Killing of 1856–1857, Dhlomo’s play presents ‘not merely a work of historical recovery or a reflection of increasing segregation but also an engagement with the full range of nationalist imaginings at work in the New African era’ (Wenzel 83). In this regard, it is pertinent to recall that a more immediate precursor for the millenarianism presented in the play was the arrest of Nontetha Nkwekwe in 1922 and her death in the same year of its publication. Like Nongqause, Nkwenkwe was a millennialist prophet. Responding to the Spanish Influenza, Nkwekwe’s prophecies eventually provoked the South African authorities to incarcerate and then institutionalize her. Given the increased attention on the influenza as a shaping influence on the modernism of 1922 and after, this essay figures Dhlomo with an expanded global modernism that engages more explicitly with its millenarian correspondents.

Keywords:

• H. I. E. Dhlomo
• global modernism
• millenarianism
• Nongqause/Nongqawuse
• The Girl who Killed to Save

Notes

1 Following Wenzel (2009), I use the accepted spelling of Nongqawuse’s name to refer to the historical person and ‘Nongqause’ to refer to Dhlomo’s character.

2 Since the portable medical thermometer was only invented in 1867 by Thomas Clifford Allbutt and the Cattle-Killing took place in 1857–1858, the former’s anachronistic appearance only reinforces the impression that medical interpretations are significant for this final scene.

3 See Munslow Ong’s criticism of Meihuizen’s assumption that African writing takes its bearings from ‘European modernism’.

4 By this, I don’t mean to dismiss as unimportant the qualification that such strategies are motivated by the politics of recovery; rather, I want to insist, rather strongly, that the relative canonicity of the Pounds, Eliots and Woolfs have always relied on recovery projects, from Laura (Riding) Jackson and Robert Graves’s 1928 A Survey through to the canonical mainstays of Hugh Kenner, Theodor Adorno and Frank Kermode.

5 I am grateful to Rick de Villiers and the two peer reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. My errors remain my own.