King of the Xhosa, Xolilizwe Sigcawu has proclaimed king of all the Xhosa peoples, including the Thembu, the ethnic group to which Nelson Mandela belongs. Like the four million other Xhosa of the Transkei, the king lives poverty on a kraal (farm) in the Umtata area. His authority and prestige have not survived the Xhosa people’s tragic history. In the early nineteenth century. Nguika, a Xhosa chief, committed the terrible blunder of appealing to the English to defeat his rival, Ndamble. The English made him pay dearly for their support. For over fifty years, they harassed the Xhosa. Not content with defeating them, they humiliated them. Sir Harry Smith, an English high commissioner, had a peculiar sense of decorum: he imprisoned Chief Sandile and his Xhosa warriors when they came to sue for peace, and forced the chief to kiss his boots. In 1854, when the Crimean war erupted between Russia and England, the Xhosa believed that the Russians were blacks come to free them. They acted on the prophetic vision of Nongqawase, a sixteen-year-old Xhosa girl, who had seen her dead ancestors emerge from a river in carriages and order her people to slaughter the livestock and stop cultivating the land. On the day of deliverance, the two red suns would appear. Then an army of the dead would arise, hordes of livestock would invade the hills, and the Russians would sweep the English from the surface of the earth. Those who refused to follow the prophecy would perish in a terrible hurricane. Some Xhosa believed in this formidable vision. In the years that followed, more than twenty million Xhosa would die of hunger.