Every August, South Africans commemorate Women’s Day by celebrating the women who marched on the Union Buildings in 1956.
Their courage receives rightful honour. Yet our national memory rarely travels beyond the twentieth century. Long before apartheid, before the Union of South Africa, before the discovery of diamonds and gold transformed the political economy of the region, African women governed kingdoms, directed diplomacy, defended territory and confronted one of the most formidable imperial powers of the nineteenth century.
Many of their names have faded from public consciousness. School textbooks devote generous attention to governors, missionaries, military officers and colonial administrators. African queens appear only fleetingly, their authority confined to the margins of a history written largely through imperial eyes.
Europe possessed its own histories of queens and female regents, so colonial officials understood that women could govern. They simply withheld equivalent recognition from African royal women. European female sovereignty entered the archive as dynastic government, while African women who exercised constitutional authority appeared as wives, dependants or informal advisers. This distinction arose from imperial ideas about African political life.
Few illustrate that historical erasure more clearly than Queen Nonesi kaFaku, the Mpondo-born Queen of the abaThembu.
Women’s Day offers an opportunity to restore her place within South Africa’s political history.
Stephanie Victor’s doctoral research provides one of the most substantial scholarly accounts of Nonesi’s life. Victor places her within a broader history of Xhosa-speaking royal women whose authority arose through lineage, marriage, kinship, economic resources and recognised constitutional positions. Her research also acknowledges competing accounts of Nonesi, rather than forcing a single neat narrative onto a political life shaped by contested succession and colonial interference.
Nonesi was born around 1810 into the amaMpondo royal house. She was the daughter of King Faku and Queen Nokweya, who came from the Nqayiya section of the amaBomvana. Her marriage to King Ngubengcuka of the abaThembu around 1828 strengthened relations between two powerful royal houses at a time when British expansion was beginning to transform the political geography of the Eastern Cape.
She entered the abaThembu royal house as Ngubengcuka’s Great Wife. This position carried constitutional responsibility for the continuity of the Great House and the succession. Victor’s account states that Nonesi could not conceive and that Mthikrakra, the son of a supporting wife, entered the Great House as her son. Queen Nomrinti, Ngubengcuka’s sister and the wife of King Sarhili, also played a decisive role in determining the ranking of Ngubengcuka’s sons and securing Mthikrakra’s place as heir.
Mthikrakra’s relationship with Nonesi carried the full maternal, political and legal meaning accorded to it within abaThembu custom. African systems of kinship cannot be reduced to European ideas of biological motherhood. Nonesi became his mother through the constitutional processes that located him within her house and established his claim to the kingship.
When Ngubengcuka died in July 1830, Mthikrakra was still a child. The succession opened a period of political uncertainty. Historical accounts differ over whether Nonesi or Nkosi Fadana assumed the regency. Victor preserves this disagreement and concludes that both exercised authority, with Nonesi operating as a queen mother, regent or co-regent. A visitor in 1832 recorded that she was consulted on affairs of importance.
In 1838, Nonesi moved with Mthikrakra to the Imvani River, placing distance between their household and Fadana while establishing a separate political centre for the Great House. Mthikrakra became king in 1844, although Nonesi’s influence continued. Her authority had grown through years of protecting the succession, cultivating relationships with councillors and representing the interests of the royal house.
British expansion placed increasing pressure on that authority. Nonesi and Mthikrakra sometimes pursued neutrality or cooperation in their dealings with the colony, a strategy intended to protect abaThembu interests within a rapidly narrowing political field. Colonial officials interpreted such cooperation as submission and continued to take land. Sir Harry Smith extended colonial boundaries onto Mthikrakra’s territory in 1847 and 1848. Victor records the infamous occasion on which Smith placed his boot upon the king’s neck, turning diplomacy into a public performance of imperial domination.
This episode revealed the limits of accommodation. African rulers could honour agreements, avoid war and maintain diplomatic relations, yet colonial officials continued to redraw borders and diminish their jurisdiction. Empire demanded control over the land, political institutions and labour of African societies.
Mthikrakra died while his heir, Ngangelizwe, was still a minor. Sources differ on the date, with abaThembu historian Jongikhaya Mvenene placing his death in 1849. Nonesi governed during Ngangelizwe’s minority and carried the Great House through another period of vulnerable succession. Her political life therefore extended across the reign of her husband, the minority and kingship of Mthikrakra, and the minority of her grandson.
The cattle-killing movement of 1856 and 1857 arrived during this regency.
Nongqawuse’s prophecies promised that the ancestors would rise, healthy cattle would return and colonial power would disappear once people slaughtered their existing cattle and ceased cultivation. The movement spread through societies already devastated by warfare, cattle disease, territorial loss and the expansion of colonial administration. Jeff Peires’s research estimates that a substantial minority rejected the prophecies, becoming known as the amagogotya, or unbelievers.
Queen Nonesi rejected the prophecy.
Victor identifies both Nonesi and Nkosi Joyi as confirmed unbelievers. Nonesi struggled to prevent people within the Tambookie Location from slaughtering their cattle. The crisis deepened when the pro-killing Ndungwana chief Qwesha and Nkosi Fadana attacked unbelievers and drove away livestock for slaughter. Nonesi organised a successful commando against Fadana’s men, although Joyi’s subsequent intervention also revealed the limits placed upon her authority by older hierarchies within the abaThembu kingdom.
Her opposition carried immense political risk. The prophecy held spiritual force among people who had endured repeated invasion and dispossession. Nonesi nevertheless defended the cattle upon which households, cultivation, marriage relations and collective survival depended. The destruction of those resources would intensify famine and leave communities vulnerable to colonial control.
The catastrophe confirmed that danger. After the cattle killing, colonial authorities expanded their control over movement, leadership and land. The Pass Act of 1857 restricted the movement of people and livestock, while colonial officials such as J. C. Warner increasingly interfered in chiefly stipends, domestic disputes and territorial boundaries.
The colonial government then began pressing the residents of the Tambookie Location to move. The territory around present-day Lady Frere later became the Glen Grey Division, named after Sir George Grey. During Grey’s governorship, his administration had already intensified the incorporation of African territories into the Cape’s political economy. The later name placed his imprint upon land whose African inhabitants had endured sustained colonial pressure.
The removal campaign took clearer form under Warner and Richard Southey. Officials wanted the fertile Tambookie Location for white agricultural settlement and proposed moving the abaThembu across the Indwe River, where they would also serve as a buffer between colonists and the amaGcaleka. Initial negotiations failed when the abaThembu questioned colonial jurisdiction and the legitimacy of occupying land claimed by King Sarhili.
By the 1860s, Warner’s relationship with Nonesi had deteriorated. He had previously defended the “faithful” queen, yet he later attacked her authority when she opposed removal. Colonial officials argued that her political role had ended after Ngangelizwe reached adulthood. Nonesi rejected their attempt to extinguish an authority built over decades of governance.
In 1865, several chiefs accepted relocation. Nonesi refused to leave.
Her refusal defended the relationship between land, political authority and collective belonging. Colonial administrators treated African communities as populations they could transfer according to imperial requirements. Nonesi understood that removal would fracture the political community she had preserved through succession, war and famine. Southey’s administration responded by banishing her to Pondoland.
Her political life belongs within a wider Southern African history of female government. The Modjadji dynasty governed the Balobedu through an institution of queenship carrying political and spiritual authority. Queen Mmanthatisi led the Batlokwa through the upheavals of the early nineteenth century. Queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo later exercised authority among the Ndebele, while Queen Labotsibeni Mdluli guided eSwatini through colonial encroachment. Each governed within a distinct political tradition. Their histories expose the narrowness of colonial archives that recognised African government only when it resembled European expectations.
Queen Nonesi died in 1880. Fourteen years later, Cecil Rhodes’s government passed the Glen Grey Act in the district named after Sir George Grey. The Act restricted African landholding, imposed labour taxation and deepened the coercion of African men into wage labour. It gave legislative form to the political economy Nonesi had confronted throughout her life.
Women’s Day carries us back into that longer history of African women defending land, sovereignty and political community. Nonesi protected Mthikrakra’s succession, governed during Ngangelizwe’s minority, opposed the cattle killing and resisted colonial removal. Her authority remained contested, negotiated and constrained, yet it endured across half a century of imperial expansion.
Queen Nonesi confronted the empire through the sustained labour of governance. Her name belongs among Southern Africa’s great political leaders.
* Gillian Schutte is a social critic, writer, and filmmaker whose work confronts power through a counter-hegemonic, class-based lens. She exposes neoliberalism, the whiteness construct, and the role of media in upholding dominant systems.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL
