When the Spirits Scatter
Extraction, war, and the fragile balance of civilisation
In the modern world we like to think we have left spirits behind. We explain the world through economics, geopolitics, and technology. Wars are fought for resources or security. Markets expand because of incentives and innovation. Societies rise and fall through institutions and ideas.
But older traditions often saw things differently.
Across many cultures — including those of southern Africa — people understood that human societies move within a deeper triad:
extraction, war and spirits.
These forces were never separate. They were entangled. When one moved, the others moved with it.
North Atlantic modernity dismantled that understanding. It separated the spiritual from the material and accelerated technological power in the process.
And yet something curious seems to be underway.
The more our systems buckle under pressure — ecological, political, psychological — the more it feels as if something older is returning.
In Ngoma traditions there is a phrase for moments like this: the scattering of spirits.
A prophecy in a time of rupture
South African children are often told the story of the young Xhosa girl Nongqawuse. For generations the story was framed as a cautionary tale about superstition. In apartheid classrooms it was used as evidence of the dangers of believing in spirits and ancestors rather than rational thinking.
But listen more carefully and a different story begins to emerge.
In 1856, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, a young girl named Nongqawuse went to chase birds from the crops in her uncle’s fields. While she was there, she said she encountered the spirit of her father.
Her parents had died in the frontier wars between the Xhosa people and the expanding British colonial frontier. These wars would stretch across a century — the longest sustained resistance to colonial expansion anywhere in Africa.
Nongqawuse was an orphan. In Setswana there is a word for this: khutsana. The word carries more weight than the English translation. It does not simply refer to a child without parents. In traditional knowledge systems it also evokes the danger of “orphaning knowledge” — extracting ideas from their proper context and lineage.
When Nongqawuse returned home she told her uncle, Mhlakaza, what the spirits had said. If the Xhosa people wished to defeat the colonisers, they would have to make a sacrifice. They were to slaughter all their cattle. Destroy their crops. Empty their granaries. In return, the ancestors promised that the European settlers would be swept into the sea. New cattle would emerge from the earth, healthier than before.
It was an extraordinary prophecy. Yet it did not arise in a vacuum.
The Xhosa herds had been devastated by a lung disease introduced by European livestock. Cattle were the backbone of the economy and deeply embedded in spiritual life. In a society shaped by ideas of balance and reciprocity, sacrificing accumulated wealth was not as unthinkable as it might seem today.
Mhlakaza, Nongqawuse’s uncle, was a diviner — someone trained to interpret communications from the ancestral realm. He was also fascinated by Christianity and had been recently confirmed into the Church of England, writes historian Noël Mostert.(1)
He carried the prophecy to the Xhosa king. After deliberation, the king endorsed it. And Mhlakaza made it his mission to spread the word.
What followed was one of the most devastating episodes in southern African history. Across the Eastern Cape a millenarian movement erupted. People slaughtered their cattle in enormous numbers. Crops were destroyed. Granaries burnt. More than 400,000 cattle were killed.
When the promised transformation did not arrive, famine swept through the region. Tens of thousands died from starvation and disease. By the end of the 1870s, the Xhosa nation was shattered and colonial authorities moved rapidly to seize the land.
The prophecy had failed.
A century of blame
For almost two centuries historians have debated who was responsible. Some blamed amagogtya – “those who refused to obey a seer”. Others blamed Nongqawuse herself. Still others blamed her uncle and the king for misinterpreting her visions. Liberal commentators used the episode as proof of the dangers of “backward belief”. Marxist historians suggested that the British governor Sir George Grey may have quietly manipulated events to weaken Xhosa resistance.
Explanations multiplied. Blame flew in every direction.
Yet historians Helen Bradford and Msokoli Qotole offer a more sobering interpretation. They suggest the tragedy unfolded within a society whose worldview was disintegrating under the pressure of colonial capitalism. (2)
The old order was collapsing. The new order had not yet stabilised.
In times of interregnum, meaning fragments. Internal divisions deepen.
Decisions become unpredictable.
From the perspective of the Ngoma knowledge tradition — the healing and cosmological system that underpins much of southern African spiritual life — there is another way to describe such conditions.
A century of extraction and war had scattered the spirits.
The triad beneath civilisation
Human societies tend to operate within a three-way tension: extraction, war and spirits.
Extraction refers to drawing resources from the earth — calories, land, minerals, energy—in ways that deliver a surplus. Surplus allows populations to grow and technologies to develop. But it also pushes societies outward. When local resources become insufficient, new territories must be accessed.
That is where war comes in.
From ancient empires to modern geopolitics, war has often been the mechanism through which societies secure resources or defend them.
But historically there has been a third force within this system: spiritual traditions.
In many Indigenous cosmologies, spiritual practice functions as a regulating mechanism within the extraction–war dynamic. Rituals of reciprocity remind communities that resources are not merely inert matter but part of a living system.
These traditions often impose constraints: taboos, seasonal restrictions, ceremonies of return. They also help societies interpret and metabolise disruption.
When war or catastrophe strikes, ritual and divination offer structured ways of restoring coherence between the present and the past — between people, the ancestors and the land.
In other words, the spiritual dimension can act both as brake on technology and adaptation mechanism within civilisation.
What modernity removed
For most of human history these three forces remained entangled.
But something distinctive took place in one particular modernity. From the 1600s, across Europe and the North Atlantic world, spiritual authority was progressively separated from the material and political realms.
What disappeared in the process were many of the cultural mechanisms that had historically moderated extraction — rituals of restoration, cosmologies that placed limits on accumulation, traditions that framed the natural world as relational rather than inert.
Technological capability surged ahead of cosmological constraint. War technologies advanced just as rapidly.
A violent blend of war, coercive governance and religious legitimacy outcompeted other forms of social organisation, enabling industrial-scale extraction across much of the planet. Some local knowledge systems were eradicated. Others rapidly adapted to keep spiritual practice embedded in everyday life. None survived unscathed.
Across Africa, ancestral traditions — many of them adaptive modernities of their own — continued to evolve. Rituals changed. Healing systems incorporated new knowledge. Lineages expanded to accommodate new forms of disruption, including the phenomenon of War Ancestors.
In Ngoma traditions, innovation is not judged by whether it preserves old forms. It is judged by something subtler: whether the ancestors would recognise the intention. Continuity lies not in repeating the past but in remaining aligned with Umoya — the Breath of Life.
That alignment must be renewed in every generation.
The return of the displaced
Modern science appears to have eliminated the spirits. But it may be more accurate to say something else. The dominant modernity displaced them.
When societies lose shared frameworks for metabolising disruption, the underlying spiritual forces do not disappear. They simply reappear in distorted forms.
In today’s world they surface as conspiracy movements, apocalyptic politics, techno-messianism, algorithmic mythologies, and a proliferation of New Age or neo-tribal spiritualities.
Narratives fragment. Collective meaning becomes unstable. Systems pushed beyond their limits begin to behave in strange ways. From the perspective of traditions like Ngoma, this is not surprising.
It is what happens when the spirits scatter.
The challenge ahead
Every modern civilisation must find reliable ways to navigate uncertainty.
Indigenous modernities developed these through ritual, lineage and disciplined spiritual practice. Contemporary societies rely on scientific method, institutions and technological infrastructures.
Both are attempts to do the same thing: make sense of forces larger than ourselves.
The challenge is not to collapse these traditions into one another — as if ritual were simply primitive science, or science an advance on spirituality.
Nor is the answer to extract fragments of Indigenous knowledge and insert them into modern systems like cultural ornaments.
The real question is whether fundamentally different systems can enter into conversation without immediately reducing one to the terms of the other.
That kind of encounter rarely happens in the places where global elites gather to discuss the future. It tends to happen more slowly — through relationships, through working together, through encounters that change the participants themselves.
Learning alongside Indigenous traditions then becomes possible — not through appropriation, but through transformation of the learners.
Because if the story of Nongqawuse tells us anything, it is this:
When societies are pushed to the limits of their coherence, they begin searching desperately for ways to restore balance.
Sometimes those searches go terribly wrong. But they also reveal something fundamental.
Civilisations do not collapse only because they run out of resources. They collapse when they lose the ability to make sense of the forces they have unleashed.
And that, perhaps, is the challenge of our time.
——
References:
Mostert, N. (1992) Frontiers. The epic of South Africa’s creation and the tragedy of the Xhosa people. London: Jonathan Cape (p 1182).
Bradford, H. & Qotole, M. (2008) ‘Ingxoxo enkulu ngoNongqawuse (a great debate about Nongqawuse’s era)’, Kronos, vol. 34, no. 1.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
This article is an edited extract from my book Diviner Mind: How Organisations Can Learn from the Indigenous Science of Uncertainty. Available from Amazon. In SA, available from Takealot and in bookstores from April 2026.