In the cattle-killing frenzy that followed they killed between 300,000 and 400,000 head of cattle. In the resulting famine, the population of the province dropped from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000. This is a photo of Nongqause’s gravestone:
Neither the cattle nor the Xosa tribe recovered from this deadly cure.Every species has its lurking danger waiting to pounce – Hendra virus for horses, Johne’s disease in sheep, veroa mites attacking bees, bird flu, swine fever, mad cow disease, monkey pox, wooden tongue, myxomatosis – even the plant kingdom has its rusts and blights.
The spirit of Nongquase lives on in today’s bureaucracy – the bureaucratic instinct is to kill every member in any threatened herd to ensure all sick ones die.
There is one fatal flaw in the scorched earth disease control so loved by the bureaucracy – it fails to encourage the survival and multiplication of resistant individuals. Those individuals who survive, showing that they are resistant to the disease, are also slaughtered – there is no survival of the fittest, no evolution of a resistant strain under the Nongquase remedy.
For example, a disease was detected in Australian beehives – it is being managed by a scorched earth policy of isolating and exterminating all nearby bees. Naturally honey supplies are dwindling and there are fears for the pollination of fruit trees and crops.
In our local Woolworths, the long shelves usually devoted to eggs were empty last week. Why? Followers of Nongquase found some sick hens on some farms and then murdered every hen in every flock where “bird flu” was detected. Entire flocks are culled when even one bird tests positive.