Mfengu-Rharhabe Rivalry and the Rise of Lennox Sebe

Conventionally, one distinguishes between two ethnic groups in the Ciskei: the Rharhabe Xhosa, who are descended from the first Bantu-speaking people to inhabit the area, and the Mfengu, a generic name for several distinct groupings of associated clans who fled from Zululand during the time of King Shaka (1818–1828) and settled in the eastern Cape.^[18] It is important to emphasize that members of both these groups are to be found in the Transkei as well as the Ciskei: they cannot be characterized as distinctly Ciskeian peoples. Initial cultural differences between Rharhabe and Mfengu—for example, that the Mfengu pierced the ears and the Xhosa did not—have long since faded into insignificance. They have been overshadowed by the cataclysmic events of the year 1835, when the Mfengu were persuaded by the missionary Ayliff to desert their Xhosa patrons and seek Colonial protection.

On the 14 May 1835, the Mfengu gathered under an old milkwood tree in Peddie district and swore a great oath to obey the Queen, to accept Christianity, and to educate their children. This oath was to have momentous consequences. The Mfengu fought alongside the Colonial forces in all the Frontier Wars and were rewarded by extensive tracts of Rharhabe land. As the better-educated and more European-oriented group, they naturally secured the bulk of elite positions as clerks, teachers, peasants, and petty traders that were available to blacks in an elective system based on merit and achievement, as opposed to the pre-colonial Xhosa pattern of strong hereditary chiefs. They viewed themselves as the bearers of a great universal Christian Civilization, and tended to regard the Rharbabe and other Xhosa as backward and uncivilized. Every 14 May since 1907 has been celebrated as Fingo Emancipation Day, with a ceremony held under the old milkwood tree where the Mfengu oath was sworn.

The Rharhabe, for their part, resented Mfengu predominance in the professions and salaried posts, their hold on the headmanships and other organs of local political authority, and their control of land which had formerly belonged to the Xhosa. S.E.K. Mqhayi, the Xhosa national poet, accused the Mfengu of celebrating Fingo Emancipation on the anniversary of the very day that the revered Xhosa king Hintsa was murdered and mutilated by Colonial forces in 1835. In 1909, the Xhosa responded with a memorial celebration dedicated to Ntsikana (d. 1821), the first local prophet of Christianity, who was a Rharhabe Xhosa. The rivalry between Rharhabe and Mfengu, originating in Frontier Wars and sustained by economic and social competition ever since, thus found institutional expression as far back as the turn of this century.

The National Party's policy of retribalization, first expressed in the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, aimed at pulling down the remnants of the old Cape liberal tradition and its concept of universal equality grounded in common Christian and democratic ideals and replacing it with a tamed and deformed version of pre-colonial political discipline hinging on chieftainship. This development obviously threatened the Mfengu, who had been the main beneficiaries of the Cape tradition, and offered opportunities to the Rharhabe whose ancient rights and long discarded chieftainships had been fully recorded in the old books and documents that government ethnologists now rediscovered. A new spirit of

self-assertiveness entered the Rharhabe ranks, and the return of the Rharhabe Paramountcy from eighty years of exile beyond me Kei became the occasion of deliberate public insults directed against the Mfengu.

Ironically, it was the Mfengu attempt to preempt their Rharhabe rivals which precipitated their downfall. Justice Mabandla, who was both a Mfengu hereditary chief and an educated man, seemed to accommodate both government and Mfengu aspirations. Uncomfortably aware that the new dispensation played into Rharhabe hands, in 1968 Mbandla and his associates issued a 'Fingo Manifesto', in which they requested that the Mfengu be regarded as entirely independent of the Rharhabe, and that representation in the coming 'New Deal' arrangements outlined by the Proclamation R143 of 1968 should be structured along ethnic lines. The South African government was not averse to stirring up ethnic hatreds and the Commissioner General made a public attack on the Xhosa during the Fingo Emancipation celebration of 1969. The New Deal Executive was explicitly made up of two Mfengu, two Rharhabe, one Sotho and one Thembu. With the excision of Herschel and Glen Grey districts, which became part of the Transkei in 1976, the latter groups lost their political significance.

Mabandia was Chief Executive. Sebe, the leading Rharhabe, was Minister of Education. They did not work well together. Mbandia accused Sebe of holding secret meetings and plotting against his government. Sebe accused Mabandla of ethnic favouritism and of blocking the applications of Rharhabe chiefs for government recognition. When Sebe was dropped to the less glamorous Agriculture portfolio, he began to organize his own political party, the Ciskei National Independence Party (CNIP), for the upcoming 1973 elections. The CNIP was backed by almost all those Rharhabe who were prepared to accept Bantu Authorities. The other Xhosa member of the Executive Council, L.S. Mtoba, stayed with Mabandla, as did the Rharhabe Paramount Chief, Bazindhlovu Sandile. But the presence of such prominent Rharhabe in his ranks did not help Mabandla. 'Why should we be ruled by a Fingo?' the CNIP asked, and by persistently beating on the ethnic drum, they awakened the historical and material grievances of the Rharhabe and rallied them to Sebe's cause.