Enoch Mgijima was born at Bulhoek in 1868, the son of Jonas Mayekiso Mgijima. Enoch's father grew up in the Hlubi chiefdom in the foothills of the Drakensberg/Ukuhlamba mountains during the upheavals of the early decades of the nineteenth century. During this period of turbulence, many people were forced to flee their homes and find new places to settle. After a group of Matiwane's Ngwane attacked the Hlubi chiefdom in the 1820s, it broke apart, and the Mgijimas joined a Hlubi group which eventually made its way to the chiefdom of the Gcaleka Xhosa in the Eastern Cape. These emigrants came to be known as Mfengu, which means ‘we are wanderers who seek help’. They were given this name because they arrived with few possessions, and the Gcaleka provided them with dairy cattle and grain to sustain them and get them on their feet.

But the Mfengu wanted their own land and cattle herds, and eventually many of them decided to turn against their benefactors. When the British fought a war against the Gcaleka Xhosa in 1834–1835, the British army commanders asked the Mfengu for their support. In return, the British offered them land of their own. In addition, the Wesleyan Methodists assisted the Mfengu because they hoped to convert many of them to Christianity. In May 1835, thousands of Mfengu who crossed the Kei River were resettled in various places between the Fish and Keiskamma Rivers. This is a section of the region that came to be known as the Ciskei.

Enoch Mgijima's family was among those who lived among the Gcaleka before moving near to Peddie. Then they resettled in the Herschel district before finally acquiring a plot of land in a place called Bulhoek, a sub-district of an African location called Kamastone, named after the Gqunukwebe Chief Kama and William Shepstone, a Methodist missionary. The British believed that if they gave ‘friendly’ Africans land, white farmers would be protected in wars with other Africans. They also wanted white farmers to have nearby sources of cheap African labour to tend their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and cultivate their lands.