We had a number of great prophets and prophetesses amongst our people and one of these prophetesses was a woman called Malitsupa, the Lady of Clay. Some people call her Matsuba.
This woman used to stay in a cave where she made a lot of pots for a living and each time she made a pot, she had a vision of the future and many of the things she foretold, have come true.
She foretold that people will live in mountains of steel, crystal and stone and that they would walk on a black surface where they would be eaten by animals of iron, where animals of flesh ate them before. She said further that when the world draws to its end, men and women will resemble each other. There will be little distinction between black and white, yellow or red. People will all look alike and you won’t be able to tell who a man is and who a woman.
The kings of the world will fight against each other and there will be nothing but disorder throughout the world.
Malitsupa went on to say that little girls would give birth to babies at a time before a child should be doing that.
This woman lived long before Van Riebeeck landed in the Cape. The Basothos remember her because there are still many who are descended from her. She used to prophecy in a cave in Lesotho.
This ‘comet’ in the painting speaks of the end of the world. It speaks of the red star that will come rising from the south, setting in the north, which will cause great earthquakes throughout the world and bring about the end of human civilization as we know it. But it will not be the end of the human race. After this, humanity will be reborn again after a long struggle to recover from the shock of what will happen.
Our people know about comets. They call them brooms.
What will bring about the end of the world won’t be a comet. It will be a star, a very big star almost as big as the sun, which like a comet will have a fiery tail, but it will be almost as big as the sun and it will be red. This is the one that I am showing here in this picture.
Our people believe that this thing will rise in the south and set in the north and that it will bring about earthquakes of unbelievable destructivity. It will bring about floods. It will bring about great upheavals which we don’t even remotely imagine now. It will cause an intense cold to fall upon the earth and also it will cause floods where the sea will escape from the shore and climb up all the great mountains of the world.
Villages will be swept away. Human beings will not be able to find a home, except on the tops of the highest mountains, if they can get there. Those who get there will face great cold, terrible wind, starvation and if they survive that, they will face rain falling directly from heaven; rain, of fiery stones, not just rain water. These and many other things, we are told, will happen.
