This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nongqawuse was a young Xhosa woman, orphaned early in life and raised by her uncle Mhlakaza, who from April 1856 reported visions of ancestor spirits at the mouth of the Gxarha River in the Eastern Cape. Mhlakaza served as her principal interpreter and promoter to the Xhosa chiefs, a role that carried the visions from a single young woman's report into a matter the wider Xhosa chiefdoms would take seriously. Research by the historian Jeff Peires identifies Mhlakaza as probably the same man as Wilhelm Goliat, once a servant and companion to an Anglican archdeacon, a background that helps account for the Christian elements woven through the prophecy he promoted.
The visions carried a specific instruction, that the Xhosa people must kill their cattle, already dying in large numbers of an introduced lung sickness, and destroy their stored grain, so that the ancestors would return and drive out the colonial presence on the frontier. Paramount Chief Sarhili of the Gcaleka Xhosa believed the visions and lent them his authority across the wider Xhosa chiefdoms, a decision that carried Nongqawuse's reported prophecy from a local report into a movement affecting an entire people, well beyond anything a single uncle's promotion could have achieved alone.