uNomadonsa

Ande Magoso’s work, uNomadonsa, introduces a new character into the historical narrative surrounding the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856 to 1857 and the story of uNongqawuza. uNomadonsa is imagined as the spirit of an old Xhosa hero who has witnessed the destruction and suffering of his people and returns among them.This approach connects to Saidiya Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation, particularly her questioning of what happens when the archive is incomplete, fragmented, or shaped by systems of power. Rather than treating these gaps in historical records as empty spaces, Magoso uses imagination to enter them and speculate about the lives, voices and perspectives that may have been excluded from dominant historical narratives. For Magoso, uNomadonsa becomes a form of speculative knowledge production. Although the character is imagined, the questions he raises are grounded in a real historical experience of loss, violence and displacement. Through imagination, oral storytelling and ancestral presence, Magoso creates another way of thinking about histories that cannot be fully recovered through conventional archives.