One can’t blame the late Enoch Mgijima for the current non delivery woes of the municipality named after him (he died in 1928) but his life story does give some clue as to what might come to pass. Born in 1868 he became a Christian Xhosa prophet and evangelist who later formed his own breakaway church known as the ‘Israelites’; 163 of whom died, 129 were wounded and 95 taken prisoner in a land dispute that became known as the ‘Bulhoek’ massacre (1921).
He had his first vision in 1907 in which an angel appeared and told him that God had chosen him to help his people get their worshipping practices more in line with what is pleasing to a deity. When he saw Halley’s Comet in 1910 he became convinced the vision was genuine and that God was getting pretty fed up with the lax ways of mankind and it was up to Enoch to help them buck up their ideas.
Flush with his success and the ever growing number of followers Enoch decided to go in for a bit of soothsaying and predicted that the world would end before Christmas 1912 and that would be followed by thirty days of rain. As a result all his followers stopped their agricultural activities on the sensible premise that there wouldn’t be much point in planting anything to harvest if the world was going to end.
One of his sharper followers asked how they would know it was raining if the world had ended which rather flummoxed Enoch. Needless to say the world didn’t end by Christmas 1912 making this one of the first examples of non delivery by a community leader in the Eastern Cape. Neither did it rain for thirty days so nothing new there.
A battered and bruised Enoch went off to sulk and have a lot more visions and when he was told by his fellow evangelists to lighten up on the visions he refused and was ex-communicated from the Church of God and Saints of Christ which is when he formed his ‘Israelite’ movement. Despite his hectic schedule of talking to angels and running a ‘prophetable’ enterprise Enoch also managed to father seven children who survived him. It’s a pity about the sports stadium though.
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