Nicholas Gcaleka and the Search for Hintsa's Skull

Abstract

In early 1996, Nicholas Gcaleka, a self-styled traditional leader and healer from the Eastern Cape, set off on a ‘dream-led’ mission to the United Kingdom to recover a skull he claimed belonged to the nineteenth-century Xhosa king Hintsa. Gcaleka's claims were contested by members of the Xhosa Royal House who denounced him as a fraudster and charlatan. Subsequently, forensic tests proved that the skull he brought back was most likely that of a middle-aged European woman. This article argues that the contestation over the evidentiary methods employed to ascertain the identity of the skull was really a contestation over the paradigms and idioms informing the narration of history in the post-apartheid South African public domain. Epistemological claims were disputed; physical evidence was produced and tested; oral tradition and archives were re-engaged. Yet elite institutions – the Xhosa Royal House and the scientific establishment – were considered neither credible nor authoritative...