| Abstract | This article focuses on historiographical works on Xhosa cattle killings of 1856 in South Africa. Nongawuse was a young Xhosa girl who had a vision in which new people from overseas announced to her that the ancestors were preparing themselves to return to life with new cattle. Despite reluctance in some quarters and initial disappointments when the ancestors failed to arrive by the prescribed date, most Xhosa's did destroy their livelihood. The ancestors failed to appear. Tens of thousands of people starved to death and the survivors, forced to seek assistance in the British Cape Colony, were driven into the service of the colonists. Xhosa-speaking people in South Africa today tend to see the events in terms of a conspiracy by the colonial authorities to annihilate the Xhosa's. Such historical projects would not be of giving a voice but rather of listening to the voices that are present and upon which social history depends and learning from them.
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