This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The resurrection Nongqawuse had promised, after earlier dates passed without it occurring, was fixed for 18 February 1857 as the day the ancestors would rise and drive the colonists from Xhosa land. When that day too passed without event, the consequences fell on a people who had already killed most of their cattle and destroyed their grain stores in compliance with the prophecy Mhlakaza had promoted and Paramount Chief Sarhili had endorsed across the Gcaleka Xhosa chiefdoms.
Catastrophic famine followed, striking a population that had deliberately given up the food supply that would otherwise have carried it through hardship, a self inflicted vulnerability that made the disaster far worse than a poor harvest alone would have caused. Colonial authorities took Nongqawuse into custody for a period after the famine had run its course, holding the young woman whose reported visions had set the whole episode in motion.
Her later life is far less fully documented than the events of 1856 and 1857 themselves. Records describe her living afterward under a different name on a farm in the Alexandria district of the Eastern Cape, apart from the chiefdoms whose catastrophic losses had followed her prophecy, until her death there in 1898, four decades after the visions at the Gxarha River had first reached Mhlakaza's ears.