Women, Gender and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, c. 1806 to 1870

Helen Bradford is a South African historian whose 1996 article in the Journal of African History directly engages and critiques Jeff Peires's standard account of the Xhosa cattle-killing, arguing that Peires's own celebrated synthesis still under-reads Nongqawuse's individual agency and the internal Xhosa social tensions, particularly around gender and generational authority, that the prophecy itself addressed. Peires has publicly disputed her reading, characterizing it as filtered through a specifically feminist lens he does not share, a disagreement this record states rather than resolves. The article appears in the field's leading peer reviewed journal and represents a documented, ongoing scholarly disagreement rather than a fringe reading, which is exactly why this record cites it: not as a replacement for Peires's synthesis but as evidence that the synthesis itself remains actively contested on identifiable points. Use it for the documented historiographical dispute over how to weigh agency and causation in the cattle-killing; use Peires for the narrative history itself.