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one

Writing in a vacuum

Manisi’s public career began auspiciously in 1946 when he was invited to perform at one of the many celebrations organised to mark Ntsikana Day, an annual celebration of great significance to the Xhosa community of the eastern Cape. Such was the power of Manisi’s contribution to the occasion that in 1947 he was asked by the Ntsikana Day Committee to produce poetry at the main national event in East London. What remains of Manisi’s national debut is a sentence in an article published on 19 April 1947 in the Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu (‘The People’s Spokesman’). Reporting on the main celebrations for dispersed Xhosa audiences, the article recounts the day’s proceedings in some detail and recalls that ‘[a]s we were closing Mr Livingstone Manesi (a poet) spoke about the celebration and he reminded us of Mqhayi’ (in Opland 2005: 47). Until his death in 1945, SEK Mqhayi had held the distinguished position of official Ntsikana Day poet, an honour bestowed upon Manisi in 1947 by his audiences and by published reports like that quoted above.

The young poet’s early rise to prominence in the local popular imagination resulted in large measure from people’s experience and discussion of his talent. Yet his reputation was created in print as well as in performance contexts, with the result that he was known as Mqhayi’s successor beyond the confines of the local. After the 1947 Umteteli article, several newspaper reports of local events at which Manisi had performed augmented and circulated the poet’s literary reputation in Transkei, Johannesburg and beyond. A favourable review of his talent also featured in the published poetry of a notable contemporary, the writer St John Page Yako. In a poem commemorating the 1951 unveiling of Mqhayi’s tombstone, a public occasion attended by dignitaries and poets, Yako refers to the brilliance of Manisi’s performance at the event and berates Xhosa intellectuals, like AC Jordan, for their absence and for having lost an opportunity to hear Manisi, the nation’s newest talent:

Even Jordan of ‘The Wrath of the Ancestors’ has seen nothing

Since he has not seen the edge of Manisi’s hair,

As he gestured and acted up as if to stab the heavens.

Even Mdlele hid himself at Lovedale

Fearing for his egg-head

Lest Manisi’s dust should fall on and soil it. (in Kuse 1983: 143)

The newspaper reports and the extract from Yako’s poem suggest something of the early acclaim won by Manisi. They also indicate the symbiotic relationship between print and oral media in the making of the young poet’s reputation.

The medium of print in fact facilitated much of Manisi’s experience of Xhosa literature – that which had been recorded from oral sources as well as texts written for publication. Repeatedly in interviews, Manisi cites Mqhayi as the greatest among poets and as his main literary inspiration, yet Manisi neither met Mqhayi nor heard him perform except on record. It is certain that oral account was partly responsible for the widespread reputation attached to Mqhayi. However, Manisi’s experience of Mqhayi’s poetry was through print – he had read Mqhayi’s books and poetry collections at Lovedale as part of his literature syllabus. Manisi’s reception of Mqhayi’s poetry through print suggests the mutually implicating ways in which literacy, oral genre, Christian and book education, as well as early black nationalism operated in the young Manisi’s consciousness. Born into a community in which mission education had been available to at least four generations of Xhosa intellectuals, Manisi experienced print as one way of accessing people and ideas – and even, paradoxically, oral genres.

From the start of his public career, Manisi wrote praise poetry for newspaper and book publication in addition to performing izibongo for local audiences. Between 1947 and 1955 he contributed several poems to Umthunywa (‘The Messenger’), a Mthatha¹ newspaper, and Umteteli wa Bantu (‘The People’s Spokesman’), a newspaper published from Johannesburg by the Chamber of Mines. Both newspapers catered for mixed-language audiences with sections in English and isiXhosa (and, in the case of Umteteli, other southern African languages as well). Except for one izibongo commemorating the death of a white Native Affairs administrator, which was published in isiXhosa and English in African Studies, Manisi’s poems were always published in his mother tongue, exclusively for isiXhosa-speaking readers. The main subjects of his newspaper poetry between 1947 and 1955 were identical to those of his performance izibongo – most of them identified, encouraged support for, and exhorted right action from Mathanzima and Sabatha Dalindyebo, the Thembu paramount. In 1983, after a considerable period of silence in the pages of newspapers, Manisi’s poem mourning the death of the Xhosa academic ZS Qangule appeared in the longest-running Xhosa newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (‘Native Opinion’).

In addition to his newspaper contributions, Manisi wrote original collections of poetry in isiXhosa for book publication. Lovedale Press published his first volume, Izibongo zeenkosi zamaXhosa (‘The Praise Poems of Xhosa Chiefs’), in 1952. It comprises several sections, the first containing 35 traditional-style poems about Thembu, Gcaleka and Rharhabe chiefs. Other sections consist of stylistically diverse poems including lyrics, laments and narratives. The book would have been suitable for school prescription had it not been printed in the New Orthography which had been introduced in 1935: when the Revised Standard Orthography for Xhosa was adopted in 1955, Izibongo zeenkosi zamaXhosa was not reprinted to reflect the change and became immediately redundant for school use. Since schools constituted the major market for books published in African languages, Manisi’s first publication was fatally timed: upon its publication, the poet earned £25; no royalties ever accrued to him and the book rapidly sank into obscurity.

Manisi’s second volume, Inguqu (‘A Return to the Attack’), appeared in 1954. The author bore the £69 cost of its 500-copy print run. The book contains poetry in a range of forms, including narratives, praise poems and lyrics. The izibongo invoke a variety of subjects – from the chief, Mathanzima, to the poet, Mqhayi, to the political moderniser, Mandela. Although, like all Manisi’s publications, Inguqu is unavailable for purchase and unobtainable except from a few archives, the poem for Mandela has begun to attract renewed attention and has been discussed and occasionally reprinted and retranslated in the pages of academic studies and in Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003).

In 1977, the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University in Grahamstown published Manisi’s 39-page long poem about Transkei’s independence. Entitled Inkululeko: uzimele-geqe eTranskayi (‘Freedom: Independence in Transkei’), the izibongo was inspired by the poet’s performances at Transkei’s 1976 ‘independence’ celebrations and is dedicated to Mathanzima. Although, as Opland notes, Inkululeko catalogues Transkei’s socio-economic problems, refers to a wider African struggle, and cites Mandela as the kind of man needed to lead ‘experts and heroes/and drive slavery out of Africa/from the east to the west’ (2005: 148), it was to prove a source of shame for its author because it endorsed a political dispensation that was complicit with Pretoria’s grand design. Peter Mtuze, Xhosa poet and scholar, argues that, although Manisi was not easily ‘hoodwinked into adopting a stand that [could not] benefit the blacks in the end’, in Inkululeko the poet was ‘the mouthpiece of the Transkei authorities’ (1991: 18). It is perhaps symbolic of the increasingly incommensurate loyalties held by the poet that his first South African and academic-funded publication should defend a political order he had sought to escape by taking up academic invitations to perform poetry.

ISER published Manisi’s next two books in its ISER Xhosa Text series: in 1980, a collection of poems called Yaphum’ ingqina (‘Out Goes the Hunting Party’) containing 11 izibongo in honour of contemporary chiefs, and in 1983 Imfazwe kaMlanjeni (‘The War of Mlanjeni’), an epic about the 1850–53 frontier war fought against colonials by the Xhosa resistance leader Mlanjeni. In addition to these volumes, Manisi also wrote several unrealised manuscripts: one was lost by the publisher to whom it had been submitted, without any copies held in reserve; another, called ‘iRhodes’, was presented to Opland in 1979 for his assessment but remained unpublished because of its ungainly form and minimal prospect of attracting a readership. ‘iRhodes’ is housed as an unpublished manuscript in the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature and substantial extracts of the long izibongo have been quoted in The Dassie. The poem provides a fascinating insight into the kinds of compromises Manisi tried to make to realise his vision of multicultural harmony for South Africa.

This chapter investigates the circumstances in and influences under which Manisi produced his written izibongo. The history of the poet’s publishing career is one of struggle and apparent failure: his newspaper contributions, although they showed every sign of attracting readers’ approval, were few; none of his books sold well or was widely read, and none is now in print. In Chapter 2, I discuss the peculiar adaptability of the izibongo form to print media, and argue that, as his chances of reaching immediate adult readerships diminished, Manisi began to value, above its circulatory function, the capacity of print to preserve texts so that his poems might address future readers in more congenial times. In this chapter, I discuss the political, intellectual and publishing context in which Manisi’s writing career grew increasingly marginalised, and investigate the reasons for his continuing to write tenaciously despite the obstacles that prevented him from finding a contemporary adult readership. I outline the historically interconnected factors that influenced Manisi as a writer and that shaped the world in which he wrote his early books and newspaper poetry: Christianity, literacy, mission education, black education debates, and the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Xhosa intellectual elites. The role of Christianity and the value of education were abiding concerns of Manisi’s written and performance poetry, in which references to missionaries and book learning often betray the poet’s deeply conflicted feelings about acculturation and the material legacies of the colonial encounter.

While the colonial occupation of Xhosa territory preoccupies much of Manisi’s poetry and attracts his angriest criticism, it was the constraints of his contemporary vernacular publishing industry and the increasingly polarised national politics of racial discrimination and resistance that pressured his career as a publishing and performing praise poet. Born into a world in which Xhosa writers like Tiyo Soga, WW Gqoba, IW Wauchope, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Mqhayi and many others had published considerable numbers of poems and been widely influential contributors to Xhosa newspapers, Manisi wished to add to the intellectual exchange in isiXhosa.² However, the relative political and publishing freedoms enjoyed by the isiXhosa-speaking elite of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its claim on adult reading publics and an engaged sphere of intellectual exchange, were rapidly receding when Manisi’s writing career commenced. His early publications appeared at a time of paradigmatic change when large numbers of apartheid laws that intensified and entrenched racial segregation were being passed. In the 1950s, apartheid’s ideology of divisive ethnicity infused black education policy, was reflected in measures that constrained the vernacular publishing industry, and caused the decline of African-language newspapers. Those of Manisi’s contemporaries, like JJR Jolobe, EG Sihele, FB Teka and St John Page Yako, who had made significant literary contributions to newspapers, ceased to publish in the popular press within the first decade of apartheid rule.³

In this and the next chapter, I shall argue that Manisi’s hopes in his written poetry of addressing broad political communities on a range of subjects pertinent to black experience were frustrated by a political context in which, first, newspapers no longer hosted vigorous Xhosa intellectual and literary exchange as they had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, second, publishers sought contributions solely for the publication of school textbooks, and third, resistance writers increasingly eschewed vernacular address in favour of publishing in urban contexts in the more widely accessible English medium, rejecting the rural polity as an anachronistic institution. In this chapter, I examine each of these areas (the Xhosa newspaper industry, book publishing and the rise of resistance literature) in turn, and outline the politics and perspectives of influential black writers who preceded and wrote contemporaneously with Manisi. I argue that the worldviews and literary opportunities that Manisi inherited were rapidly challenged by the apartheid context. Manisi’s intellectual and spiritual heritage and the polarised politics of his age informed his contradictory attitudes to the act of writing and the subject of education, which throughout his career he both criticised as a political imposition and championed as the means to black liberation. It is to these attitudes that I turn at the end of this chapter in an exploration of several of Manisi’s book and newspaper izibongo.

Early Xhosa intellectuals, debate and the newspaper

Michael Cross usefully divides black politics in South Africa into three broad periods: ‘(1) Christian-liberal reformism and moderation, 1884–1943; (2) pragmatic nationalism and Africanism, 1943–1976; and (3) critical nationalism and Africanism, 1976–1986’ (1992: 41). Although Manisi produced oral and written poetry between 1947 and 1988, a period that spans Cross’s second and third phases, Christian liberalism, which was perhaps the greatest legacy of his mission education, significantly influenced his early poetry. Indeed, this early liberalism was to remain a marked strain in (and, increasingly, on) his poetry throughout his career. In the apartheid context, Manisi’s efforts to tolerate and advance the multicultural national reality were constantly challenged by his strong commitment to Xhosa tradition and ritual, and by his underlying black nationalism. These allegiances, which he had inherited from early Xhosa intellectuals, were polarised by apartheid and the urban liberation struggle and are reflected as being in tension in Manisi’s written and oral poetry.

African leaders of Cross’s first phase were well-educated proto-nationalists who ‘made use of the mass media more extensively than the later nationalists’ (1992: 43). AC Jordan (1973), in his seminal account of Xhosa literature, charts the central importance to Xhosa intellectual and literary exchange of newspapers, a form which from the second half of the nineteenth century nurtured the most illustrious Xhosa writers, among them Tiyo Soga, WB Rubusana, JT Jabavu, and the greatest of them all, Mqhayi. Early mission-educated leaders, who were among the most prolific black writers, were strongly influenced by the liberal ideologies of their Christian educators. Many of the black intellectuals in the Cape Colony qualified for the franchise under the Cape liberal system. Access to the black franchise depended on age, gender, property and literacy, and infrequently empowered black voters to instal a person of colour into the Cape Legislative Assembly. Nevertheless, black intellectuals in the Cape felt that there was scope for their political advancement: many were engaged in politics, and many wrote essays for newspaper publication that contributed to public debates about political issues affecting black people. Opland’s (1983, 1998) comprehensive account of Xhosa literature in newspapers details the long history of the periodical as a mode of exchange among the educated black elite since the arrival of mission education and, with it, literacy in southern Africa.

These early intellectuals and leaders sought liberal reforms that broadened black opportunity in terms of existing structures, rather than large-scale change. The South African Native National Congress (SANNC), later to become the ANC, of which Manisi was an active member, was created in 1912 by members of the educated black elite who claimed Christianity and liberalism as part of African tradition. The SANNC’s 1919 constitution mandated peaceful means of redress and, included within the scope of the passive approach, it advocated the use of education and literature to extend black interests. The influence of mission education on the Cape Xhosa elite was considerable. Most of them went to school at Lovedale in the Tyumie Valley. Isabel Hofmeyr points out that this place, where the first mission station in the Cape was established, where Soga was born, and where Manisi went to school at Lovedale, was ‘the focus of the earliest mission endeavours in the African interior and the most heavily missionized spot on the inland subcontinent’ (2004: 117). Lovedale established an educated, Xhosa literary community that shared reading and writing practices, and that regularly engaged in debate and discussion in the context of the Lovedale Literary Society, which comprised staff and students.

Missionaries used education and literacy as tools of conversion – they believed that Western education would draw local populations away from uncivilised tribal affiliations. Literacy, they knew, was necessary to facilitate the ‘civilising’ education they brought and, more importantly, their converts’ personal engagements with the Bible. After Ntsikana, perhaps the most famous early Xhosa convert to Christianity was Tiyo Soga, who became the first black person in southern Africa to receive a university education (which he pursued in Europe) and to be ordained as a minister (Chapman 1996; Hofmeyr 2004). Soga’s writings testify, Chapman writes, ‘to his utter involvement in the acculturation process’ (1996: 107). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cape Nguni had strenuously rejected missionary education, refusing to relinquish beliefs, identities and forms of polity to which they considered themselves bound by long and authoritative histories. However, after successive defeats against colonial forces in frontier wars, and when famine and defeat had settled on rural communities following the devastating cattle killing of 1857, that which had been solid – the chiefdom and the authority of the chief – seemed increasingly insubstantial and unstable. Many sought employment in colonial economies; others sought education in preparation for changing socio-economic futures, although the number of Xhosa who were schooled remained small.

The increasing attraction of mission education in the mid-1800s was accompanied by the rise of debates among white administrators and among black intellectuals about the purpose of black education in southern African colonies. The growth of the education debate parallels an increasing unease among many black intellectuals concerning their relationships to African and colonial worlds. Chapman argues that a sudden surge of racial discrimination following the annexation of Xhosa territory to the Cape Colony in 1877 meant that the position of accommodation between African and colonial worlds that had been adopted by Soga was no longer credible or desirable to all members of the educated elite. The Soga figure was represented in several colonial stories, Chapman asserts, as ‘the Christianised kaffir who, as the product of misguided notions of humanitarian integration, is left severely displaced’ (1996: 109). Iimbongi of the time also began to appeal to their Xhosa audiences to unite as Africans, and expressed scorn for African Christians. Chapman identifies the shift in late nineteenth-century Xhosa literature ‘from Soga’s confidence in Christianity to a political consciousness concerning the need for education, organisation and unity’ (1996: 109).

Following early missionary policy, one argument informing the black education debate that was to assume priority among black intellectuals and white government officials was for the education of a black elite along the lines of their European counterparts, so that an educated stratum might in turn lead and enlighten the masses. (Indeed, as William Beinart [1994] suggests, early African nationalists were uncertain about how they would incorporate the uneducated masses into their rather hazy vision of non-racialism.) Other white administrators advocated a strategy that was to find favour with apartheid governments in their Bantu Education scheme: the black population should be educated for their inevitable place in a labour force that would power white industry. Between these poles were other perspectives, each concerned with which segments of black communities should be educated, to what extent, with what species of syllabus, and to what end. The black education debate has been one of the most important, era-spanning issues in South African politics and race relations, and was a major subject of Manisi’s later poetry before academic audiences. The debate also shaped the context in which Manisi was provided with a brief education in the last days of the era of mission schooling, and in which he became a writer.

Although it was coercive in many respects, the education that was offered by mission institutions was incomparably superior to that provided by apartheid’s Bantu schools. Lovedale was concerned with engaging students’ minds and shaping their sensibilities by exposing them to European history, literature and music. Records of the discussions and debates that took place in the Lovedale Literary Society suggest that early black intellectuals were concerned with a range of questions. Lovedale teachers hoped that the Society would inculcate within its members a sense of literature as moral and ‘high’ art, and some critics have argued that the history of the forum provides ‘yet further evidence of the alienated black Englishness of the Lovedale elite’ (Hofmeyr 2004: 124). Certainly, there were papers on subjects such as the battle of Waterloo, Cromwell’s place in English history, Wordsworth’s poetry, and the reign of various British monarchs. Yet, Hofmeyr shows that black students were equally immersed in local questions related to agriculture, education, gender roles, forms of government, modernity and ‘civilisation’, tradition and custom, and ‘how to shape public opinion (pulpit and press)’ (2004: 125). The range suggests the relative intellectual freedom enjoyed by the early elite.

The mix of issues dealt with by students also suggests their position between Xhosa and European tradition. Hofmeyr argues that the Literary Society:

[f]unctioned as one forum for defining the interests of this new African (and largely male) elite. This group occupied a complex social position between traditional chiefs, white missionaries, and rabidly racist settlers. In relation to chiefs, the elite stressed their modernity; in relation to missionaries, their knowledge of African tradition; and in relation to settlers, their superior claims to ‘civilisation’. (2004: 125)

Although some members of the elite were more Africanist than others, who were still devoted to European ideals of refinement, the sense Hofmeyr gives us of their complex position is that all of them felt certain of their authority to express their worldviews to audiences which, they felt equally confident, would receive and respond to their statements and writings. Chiefs and traditional society, missionaries, and colonials – the triangle of orientation and address in which the early elite operated – had broken up into new and even cruder political communities by the time Manisi assumed his position on the Xhosa literary scene.

In an essay entitled ‘Fighting with the Pen: The Appropriation of the Press by Early Xhosa Writers’, Opland (2003) discusses the late nineteenth-century newspaper poetry of WW Gqoba and IW Wauchope. Both were educated at Lovedale where they were members of the Lovedale Literary Society. Gqoba became a member of the Native Education Association, which was established in 1879, and Wauchope was instrumental in forming Imbumba Yamanyama⁴ in 1882. Imbumba was ‘one of the earliest political associations for blacks in South Africa’ (Opland 2003: 23) and was specifically opposed to the Afrikaner Bond. Gqoba became the editor of Isigidimi samaXhosa (‘The Xhosa Express’) in 1888, where he encouraged and contributed to ‘an unprecedented efflorescence of literary and ethnographic’ pieces (Opland 2003: 16). Wauchope was among the many contributors to Gqoba’s paper.

The subjects that the two poets wrote about suggest the influences on the early elite (mission education, the chiefdom, and colonial politics) discussed by Hofmeyr. Opland argues that, although Gqoba and Wauchope sometimes bow to the missionary influence, they express a powerful Africanism that finds an outlet in the different literary strategies each developed. Gqoba’s long poem ‘Great Debate on Education’ was published in instalments in Isigidimi, and eventually took 1 150 lines. Written in trochaic octosyllabics, the poem was indebted for its characters’ allegorical titles to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was the second most important text (after the Bible) in mission education. The speakers in the poem present their various views on education, some in favour of the learning given to blacks and some vehemently opposed. Those opposed argue for a syllabus devoid of alien subjects and languages, like Latin, Hebrew and Greek (Opland 2003). Opland argues that the debate format of the poem allows Gqoba to appear to privilege the final judgement that black education is sufficient as it is when in fact the body of the poem provides strong arguments against the arbiter’s conclusion.

Across his writing, Wauchope often expressed contradictory beliefs. Sometimes he wrote of the need to eradicate barbarism among rural African people, claiming that customs like circumcision separated black people from God and salvation. But he often defended Xhosa tradition and rural practices. Both he and Gqoba were strong supporters of the Xhosa prophet Ntsikana and urged political unity among black people. In a March 1884 edition of Isigidimi, Wauchope claims Ntsikana as his source of inspiration ‘and identifies education as the key to the national struggle’ (Opland 2003: 25). Black unity, as exhorted by Ntsikana, and equal education would be the basis of Manisi’s political beliefs but, unlike Wauchope and Gqoba, Manisi would find it difficult to reconcile the contradictions in his outlook because he could not rely on coherent and legitimate political communities or, indeed, immediate readerships. Wauchope and Gqoba, on the other hand, had a clear sense of their audiences: when they addressed Xhosa readers in Xhosa, Opland claims, they worked to instil in them a sense of ‘pride and faith in their own system of morality’, and when they wrote in English for mixed audiences, they ‘spoke the language of their white missionary colleagues but introduced coded signals to their black colleagues’ (2003: 27, 28).

Another member of the late nineteenth-century black elite, and the editor of South Africa’s first vernacular non-missionary newspaper, JT Jabavu illustrates in his life and career the way in which the black education question and the influence of white control informed the modes and subjects of communication among the black literati of his day. Imvo zabantsundu (‘Native Opinion’), Jabavu’s paper, first appeared in November 1884 and was funded by the Afrikaner Bond. Because of its Afrikaner backing, Imvo was sympathetic to the Afrikaans position against the English, and was never free of white control despite its black editorship. Jabavu’s ideas were in line with those of white liberal thinkers – he believed in a top-down system of education that would create an educated black elite. For the masses, he advocated a basic education, arguing that modernisation should be left in the hands of the highly educated minority. According to Cross, Imvo reflected its editor’s politics of symbiotic ‘opposition and collaboration’ in that it represented ‘perhaps the most moderate and even conservative section of the African petty bourgeoisie’ (1992: 48). The paper was a prominent forum for the discussion of education policy, and came to be seen in 1916 as the official mouthpiece of the South African Native College at Fort Hare, a tertiary education institution created for black South Africans by a group of black intellectuals, one of whom was Jabavu.

Imvo was Eurocentric in its editorial policies concerning permissible literature and literary practice. Original poetry was frequently published in its pages, but the poetry was always in Western style. The izibongo that did appear in Imvo were historical, offered as monuments rather than as commentary or as supporting evidence for historical articles. In 1897, a rival newspaper called Izwi labantu (‘The Voice of the People’) set up business, again subject to white control that was personified in the figure of Cecil John Rhodes, the English entrepreneur and media magnate who backed the paper financially. While Izwi was progressive and political it was also sympathetic to the English position against that of the Afrikaners, so that in the textual rivalry between Imvo and Izwi there was also at play the opposition between different settler interests. Unlike Imvo, Izwi encouraged submissions of original, politically charged izibongo – one of its editors, the poet Mqhayi, contributed copious praise poems in response. Accordingly, Opland has characterised Izwi as a ‘rallying ground for the educated black elite’ (1998: 243) – although the fact that the paper ran only until 1909, when it folded for financial reasons, suggests the serious institutional obstacles to black intellectual exchange.

The history of the late nineteenth-century Xhosa newspaper industry reveals that white interests, whether missionary or entrepreneurial, influenced vernacular papers. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, these papers came to be managed by members of the educated black elite for the edification of, and exchange among, other members of a thin educated stratum. Readers were, by definition, educated and, despite alternative and circuitous modes of circulation such as reading aloud to illiterate family members, newspapers targeted a slim segment of Xhosa speakers. Nevertheless, the newspaper medium hosted vigorous intellectual debate among educated Xhosa speakers and vitalised the Xhosa literary scene, which was in rapid decline when Manisi penned his first publications. Among these educated turn-of-the-century readers there was fierce debate not only about education policy and politics but also about literary standards, forms and traditions. The kind of exchange I am referring to is well illustrated in an episode in the rivalry between Imvo and Izwi detailed by Opland.

On 20 November 1900, an Imvo poet, Jonas Ntsiko, published an 86-stanza attack against Izwi’s most prolific writer, Mqhayi, berating him for writing an izibongo critical of important community members and accusing him of plagiarising a praise poem produced by Chief Sarhili’s imbongi. Wandile Kuse (1978) tells us that Ntsiko’s poem was modelled on Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ – each stanza comprising two rhyming couplets, each couplet being eight syllables long. That Ntsiko could identify Mqhayi’s quotation of Sarhili’s poet demonstrates his familiarity with the genre and products of praise poetry. However, Ntsiko does not consider izibongo an appropriate genre in which to write, nor does he deem the form’s literary conventions to be operative in print, in which medium, he suggests, language and form must be proper, sentiment mild, and plagiarism deserves the ‘sound thrashing’ he advocates as Mqhayi’s punishment. Ntsiko’s own quotation of Pope’s style, a borrowing he does not acknowledge, suggests his corrective demonstration of an appropriate, educated form for print poetry. The episode suggests the divisions among black newspaper contributors about the merits of writing praise poems – the question was whether the form was sufficiently ‘literary’, ‘educated’ and able to conform to the conventions of print media. This does not mean that contributors like Ntsiko unequivocally supported colonials, even if they accepted colonial literary conventions. Chapman explains that black writers were growing increasingly disillusioned at the dawn of the twentieth century with the ‘European way’. Ntsiko had objected to the pro-British sentiments of a newspaper to which he was a regular contributor, WW Gqoba’s Isigidimi samaXhosa, demanding ‘that the editor hear the African view after Gqoba had rejected one of his articles as too hostile to the British’ (Chapman 1996: 109).

As noted, the African elite of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘was partly forged in the colonial world and claimed a place in the colonial order’ (Beinart 1994: 85). Intellectuals like JT Jabavu increasingly came under attack for their lack of radicalism as the twentieth century entered its second decade. Chapman argues that ‘[i]n contrast to the Christian liberal ideal, a voice of nascent African nationalism began to manifest itself in the projects and writings of several of Jabavu’s contemporaries and rivals’ (1996: 110). Chapman offers the work of Walter B Rubusana as an example of the transition experienced by many Xhosa intellectuals. Rubusana had translated religious tracts into Xhosa and had been involved in revising the Xhosa translation of the Bible, but as the new black commitments of the early twentieth century became clearer, he ‘found his own Christian commitments increasingly secularised as he attempted to recover African tradition, history and political rights’ (Chapman 1996: 110). Rubusana produced his authoritative anthology of Xhosa proverbs and praise poems in 1906. Entitled Zemk’iinkomo Magwalandini (‘there go your cattle, you cowards’), the volume contains recorded poems gathered from oral sources, reprints previously published texts, and publishes written poetry that had not been used by newspapers.⁵

Chapman argues that Xhosa writers like Rubusana introduced ‘a discourse of African nationalism’ into twentieth century black literature (1996: 110). But Beinart notes that while ‘[a] growing sense of South Africanism among whites had its mirror image in an explicit attempt to create a more assertive African national identity’, ‘early African nationalists did not become strongly anti-imperial’ (1994: 87, 89). These nationalists continued to believe in multiracial citizenship. According to Beinart, ‘[t]heir politics was born in the optimism imbued by partial incorporation in an imperial world; their political edge came from the shattering of that optimism’ (1994: 89). Writers like Mqhayi reflect this acculturation as well as the shifting attitudes and responses to colonial imports and policies that Beinart suggests. Mqhayi published extensively in newspaper and book form, and performed to rapturous acclaim and enduring memory, as Mandela’s (1994) account of Mqhayi’s performance at his school demonstrates. AC Jordan describes Mqhayi as a popular figure with wide influence and literary significance as a ‘poet, novelist, historian, biographer, journalist, [and] translator’, and gives us a sense of the poet’s eagerness to exploit all available media to communicate: ‘Through the press, by public orations, and in private letters, he had a message of encouragement to give to the social leaders of his people’ (1973: 104, 105).

As editor and contributor, Mqhayi made his early print reputation in the pages of Izwi labantu and in Imvo zabantsundu. His novels include an adaptation of the biblical story Samson and Delilah, uSamson (1907), and UDon Jado (1929), an allegory that, Chapman says, ‘is meant to suggest Mqhayi’s twin allegiances to the chief and the British king’ (1996: 205). Mqhayi also translated C Kingsley Williams’s Aggrey of Africa into isiXhosa (see Mqhayi 1935).⁶ His most famous work, however, is the multi-styled book Ityala Lamawele (‘The Law Suit of the Twins’) (Mqhayi 1914), which ‘is influenced by the Christian precept of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress at the same time as it dramatises legal procedure among the Xhosa’ (Chapman 1996: 205). Mqhayi also wrote many izibongo, one of which, Umhlekazi uHintsa (1937), commemorates the assassination of Paramount Xhosa Chief Hintsa. Arranged into eight cantos, the poem won the May Esther Bedford competition and, in Wandile Kuse’s assessment, ‘sustains the viability of the oral techniques of praise poetry in the written form’ (1983: 132). The poem was later republished by Lovedale Press, and is striking for its multiple modes of address to different South African audiences and to international publics, like the British. The poet also recorded two poems in a studio in 1932 or 1933 as part of a project aimed at recording traditional Bantu texts; Mqhayi’s sound recordings were published in 1934 and discussed by Opland (1977) in an article.

The range and volume of Mqhayi’s published output, when combined with his prolific performance career, supports Jordan’s assertion that the poet’s ‘contribution to Southern Bantu Literature is easily the largest and most valuable’ (1973: 105).⁷ Having inherited obligations to the chieftaincy, Mqhayi had also been educated in a Christian system of schooling. He felt that Britain, in which he had invested considerable faith, had failed Africans in 1910 when the Union of South Africa was formed. The accommodation black writers found between African concepts like ubuntu, and Western imports like Christianity and liberal humanism, enabled many of them to use Western discourses to bolster African claims to unity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, black writers became increasingly preoccupied with the question of how to unite and liberate black South Africans and, as Chapman notes, their writing ‘became discernibly more Africanist’ (1996: 203).

In 1921, the Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu was established by the Chamber of Mines. It would publish many hundreds of praise poems that, according to the long-established conventions of the oral form, explicitly discussed politics. The paper was established to mediate race relations in industry: in its bulletin of aims, published on 30 August 1924, Umteteli claimed ‘to preach racial amity … to emphasize the obligations of blacks and whites to themselves and to each other …’ (Couzens 1985: 91–92). Although the paper eschewed criticism of the mining industry, it was liberal in orientation and opposed the colour bar in industry. It was staffed by black intellectuals, like HIE Dhlomo, the influential Zulu poet, and gave considerable room to poetic expression. Among the paper’s regular contributors was the prolific female poet Nontsizi Mgqwetho, who published Christian-oriented political izibongo exclusively in Umteteli between 1920 and 1926 and, after an unexplained hiatus, between 1928 and 1929. Mgqwetho championed Umteteli as an invaluable medium of expression for black writers – certainly, as a woman poet Mgqwetho was afforded by the paper a unique opportunity to ‘speak’ as an imbongi.

Mgqwetho’s repeated calls for black unity were couched in Christian terms, but although the ANC shared her religious discourse, Mgqwetho regarded the organisation and its organ, Abantu Batho, as being ineffective in their attempts to rally and unify black communities. Duncan Brown details the rivalry between Umteteli and Abantu Batho on this score, and shows how several black intellectuals of the 1920s were embroiled in arguments over how best to organise and inspire black constituencies. Many of these debates took place in newspapers and were reflected in printed izibongo like those written by Mgqwetho. In a 1920 poem, for example, Mgqwetho accuses the ANC of sowing division, citing ‘rabble rousers’ within the Congress who ‘sermonise/and grab headlines’. ‘And as a result,’ she goes on, ‘Natal Congress walked out,/and Free State walked out,/and there the Cape’s splinters splinter’ (in Opland 2007: 18). The poet’s advice to her people is announced in a poem published in January 1924: ‘All black nations must merge,/our only strength lies in unity:/ press on until you face each other,/stop your bobbing and weaving’ (in Opland 2007: 92).

Mgqwetho’s calls for black unity and her conviction that chieftainship was established and mandated by God foreshadow part of the agenda and worldview advanced by Manisi in his izibongo. Although Manisi read Mgqwetho with great pleasure and approval, he encountered her poems only after he had begun working with Opland, several decades after their publication – because of the ephemeral nature of newspapers and the generational gap between the two poets, Manisi never read Mgqwetho’s poetry when it was current. That Manisi’s poetry seems to reflect Mgqwetho’s in many ways suggests the strength of the Christian liberal, proto-nationalist intellectual tradition that Manisi inherited from his Lovedale education and to which Mgqwetho was constantly exposed in newspaper debate.

In addition to the poems he contributed to Umteteli, with its wide readership⁸ and urban industrial base, Manisi sent several izibongo to the Mthatha newspaper Umthunywa. Published in isiXhosa and English sections, Umthunywa focused on local happenings and personalities in Transkei and East Griqualand. Whereas in Umteteli Manisi could address the South African context, the more parochial character of Umthunywa gave expression and audience to an enduring concern in his poetry with the local, with the landscapes and communities of home. Nevertheless, Manisi sent relatively little poetry to Umteteli and Umthunywa. When compared with the considerable and consistent publication of original izibongo in periodicals by poets like Mqhayi and Mgqwetho, Manisi’s contribution seems unremarkable, or perhaps surprising, in view of his seriousness and tenacity as a publishing poet. As my earlier resume of his published poetry suggests, Manisi seemed to decide in 1955, the year in which he officially broke from Mathanzima, to write poetry solely for book publication, whatever the considerable obstacles to such an ambition. There are several related reasons why Manisi chose this course.

Les and Donna Switzer (1979: 11) argue that the 1948 election, which brought the National Party to power, ‘was the beginning of the end for the protest journals’, which, together with the rest of the black press, came under white supervision. The entrenchment of Bantu Education in 1953 legislation ended missionary control of newspapers and placed papers like Imvo under Tanda Pers, a subsidiary of Afrikaanse Pers, the government’s press. Under such conditions, Opland argues, ‘Xhosa readers no longer felt inclined to contribute literature in any great quantities to newspapers’ (1998: 261). In summing up the value of the early Xhosa newspaper industry, Opland suggests the scale of the loss suffered by the Xhosa writers of the 1950s, who could no longer rely on the newspaper as a forum for adult exchange:

[Newspapers] brought Xhosa literature to maturity at the turn of the century before Xhosa books had appeared on any large scale. Newspaper bridged the gap between oral and written modes, created a literary community, and provided material for many books by most of the major Xhosa authors and editors. The work of many of the major Xhosa authors can be found only in newspapers. And above all, it is only in newspapers that we can find, for a time, free literary expression produced by adults for adult readers. (1998: 261)

Manisi wrote adult and political poetry and always sought, although infrequently found, an adult readership. The decline of the Xhosa newspaper industry and its co-option by the government’s agenda discouraged Manisi from sending further poetry to newspaper editors. He no longer felt that he was part of a national Xhosa literary community.

Some papers, like Umthunywa, which was published in Mthatha, continued to solicit literary contributions. Yet, as far as we know, Manisi sent no further izibongo to his local broadsheet. His early newspaper poetry was concerned with local Transkeian figures like Mathanzima and Sabatha. Manisi’s retreat from local newspaper publication can also be interpreted as comprising part of his withdrawal as Mathanzima’s imbongi. The newspaper is public, political property that circulates among contemporary audiences. Since izibongo is a correspondingly urgent political form, it is difficult to see how Manisi could have withdrawn from Transkei politics without forgoing newspaper publication, unless he adopted a public position against Mathanzima. As Manisi’s frequent returns to Mathanzima’s court suggest, despite his disapproval of his chief’s policies and complicities, his feeling on the subject of loyalty was highly fraught and he may not have wanted to submit his personal conflict to public scrutiny.

Manisi’s self-distancing from Mathanzima must be understood in the context of the new political phase in South Africa in which apartheid’s cornerstones, including Bantu Education, were being laid. Geographical segregation depended on the government’s purchase of support from chiefs in rural areas, where homelands were to be established. Manisi’s growing sense of Mathanzima’s complicity with Pretoria placed the poet in a difficult position – his deep sense of responsibility to the area and community of his birth and his commitment to Mathanzima were premised on rooted beliefs: first, that chieftaincy represented and embodied the wealth and well-being of the chiefdom, and second, that Mathanzima had been blessed with great promise and was capable of returning to the interests of his people. That his belief in Mathanzima seemed in 1955 to be on the brink of profound disappointment never diminished Manisi’s foundational faith in the institution of traditional leadership. That year must be understood, then, as a crisis point in the young poet’s literary career, the first of many such moments when beliefs that had once seemed easily compatible were suddenly incongruent. Manisi’s silence in immediate media suggests his difficulty in finding an appropriate public stance that could accommodate criticism of an unfolding partnership between chiefs and apartheid’s architects, while still honouring the institution of chieftaincy. It also suggests his intellectual isolation – suddenly there was no immediate newspaper public from which he could seek support and reply.

The vernacular press, ‘Bantu Education’ and resistance literature

The Lovedale Press, which was part of the Lovedale Mission, was largely responsible for stimulating and enabling Xhosa book publication in the early nineteenth century, when its primary task was to provide copies of the translated Bible and related Xhosa texts to its converts. In her study of the ways in which translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress entered into and helped create African public spheres, Hofmeyr (2004) discusses Soga’s (1868) Xhosa translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Uhambo lo Mhambi comprises a translation of the first part of Bunyan’s book. The second part was translated by Soga’s son, John Henderson Soga, and published in 1929. Hofmeyr writes that ‘students entering Lovedale were … to encounter an environment that was Bunyan saturated and they were to meet him in both Xhosa and English in an array of forums’ (2004: 120). She shows how, at the height of its influence between the 1870s and the 1940s (a period that includes Manisi’s education), Bunyan’s text ‘informed the political discussion of the elite and provided a set of metaphors for debating questions of how to fashion an African modernity’ (Hofmeyr 2004: 135).

In addition to European religious texts, however, Lovedale Press was also interested in promoting Xhosa narrative and poetry as supports for literacy and a ‘civilised’ literature. The published products had to conform to missionary imperatives. Opland explains that at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers like Mqhayi were constrained by the Press’s intervention against what it perceived as evidence in submissions of the overly traditional and tribal. Missionary censorship was, however, inconsistently applied, so that AC Jordan, for example, was allowed free range in his writing, whereas several manuscripts submitted by Mqhayi were rejected and are consequently lost to the world. According to Peires (1980), Lovedale refused submissions that were critical of the British or of missionaries, that highlighted ethnic differences or that commented contentiously on contemporary politics. Lovedale was nevertheless a prolific publisher of Xhosa writers but, as Opland (1984) points out, the Press had to concern itself increasingly with commercial realities and could not afford to publish books that had no reasonable prospect of selling. One of the certain and expanding markets for book consumption was schools, and publication requirements accordingly came to be shaped increasingly by the demands of schools for textbooks and school readers.

The demands of the school market affected the publication of Mqhayi’s classic Ityala lamawele. Lovedale wished to publish an abridged version for school prescription, in the service of which much detail essential to Mqhayi’s historical and political focus would have to be excised. Mqhayi agreed to the expurgated version on condition that the original version should be printed in addition. According to Peires, Mqhayi’s preface in the original version was ‘addressed to chiefs, councillors, ladies and gentlemen and boasts that it contains the “essence” of Xhosa writing’ (1980: 79). The school version addressed itself to pupils, the government, the Department of Education (which Mqhayi thanked for the version’s school circulation) and the Department of Justice (which was thanked by the poet for its use of his text ‘in Xhosa-language examinations for magistrates’) (Peires 1980: 79). For Mqhayi, it seems, the original version of his book contained his intended message and legacy to the men and women of his community. The abridged school version, addressed to school and government officials, was a compromise in the service of revenue, as well as textual circulation and use. This divorce between authorial meaning and intended address on the one hand, and circulation and reception on the other, supplies a telling example of the constraints upon twentieth-century Xhosa writers.

In its 1953 Bantu Education Act, the National Party government ordained an education system for black people that Manisi describes in his performance at Harvard in 1988 as being ‘impoverished./It’s intended for idiots and cretins’ (Opland 2005: 306). Syllabi privileging the teaching of practical skills were devised to prepare black children for their subordinate place in the labour market. The medium of black education was to be primarily the majority local African language. Chapman summarises the effect of the system:

Bantu Education eroded the mission schools, spread ‘vernacular’ and ‘ethnic’ education widely but thinly and, in its philosophy, reinforced the design of apartheid according to which the different African ethnic groups were regarded as having different, ‘primitive’ cultures that had little to do with the English language above levels of functional literacy and less to do with change in the scientific and technological world. (1996: 215)

Bantu Education changed the vernacular publishing industry from a fairly liberal institution to one that met the nationalist agenda: Afrikaans publishing houses wrested the monopoly on the vernacular education market from Lovedale Press, which had for so long encouraged Xhosa writers. In Chapman’s assessment, there is ‘[l]ittle African-language writing produced for schools under the strictures of Bantu Education’ that has ‘re-evaluative potential’. Generally, he argues, ‘the large themes of acculturation and transition’ that were explored in earlier Xhosa literature ‘have been trivialised [in the later literature] into trite endorsements of the exotic tribal land’ (1996: 216).

Those like Manisi, who began writing as apartheid issued its founding legislation, faced a frustrating new publishing world that was both discouraging and scarcely credible. Chapman reminds us of the promise the decade preceding apartheid’s implementation had held for African language writers: in 1936 and 1937, African authors’ conferences were held; a Literature Committee had been established and was led by prominent black intellectuals; and Lovedale Press was an active publisher. The suddenness with which this publishing scene collapsed under apartheid must have been very difficult for aspirant writers like Manisi to accept. In addition, vernacular writers faced the terrible irony that, although Bantu Education increased the need for vernacular texts (of a narrow kind), African language writing was co-opted wholesale, by virtue of its language of expression rather than its subject matter, into the Nationalist government’s strategy of ethnic division.

Opland summarises the fate of book publication in isiXhosa in this way: ‘If in the first half of the [twentieth] century … only Xhosa works in harmony with Lovedale’s mission philosophy were likely to appear, in the second half of the century only Xhosa works suitable for prescription in school are likely to appear’. The result of this shift in publishing focus, in Opland’s view, is that ‘an adult literature has not yet evolved in Xhosa’ (1984: 185). Constraining writers still further, school inspectors like HW Pahl, who recommended suitable material for school prescription, determined the range of themes and messages writers could express, and sometimes what form they should employ if they hoped their books might circulate. For instance, Pahl preferred to prescribe narrative poetry rather than lyrical poems or, even less palatable to him, traditional Xhosa izibongo.

In an interview conducted by two Vassar College students in the United States in 1988, Manisi was asked to describe his publishing environment. His response suggests his frustration as an imbongi who felt called to write about urgent and contentious political matters:

for one to be a writer he must try that the books he writes would fit the schools. You must write rubbish, let me say so. You must write rubbish, not tell the truth about the situation. If you want to write a book about poetry, so you just have to talk about trees, rivers and all my nothings. (Opland 2005: 325)

Manisi’s poetry depends on the convention that the imbongi is a political figure tasked with the role of delivering honest verdicts on his community’s behaviour. His publishing context, Manisi felt, demanded that writers exchange their freedom to write honest, adult and politically astute material for publication opportunity.

Such was the publishing environment weathered by all black writers in South Africa who sought to reach vernacular audiences in print. Chapman catalogues the obstacles facing black poets: their hoped-for reading publics were only narrowly literate and had little disposable cash to spend on book buying; publishing imperatives stipulated school-going readerships; and as apartheid strengthened so too did the liberation struggle’s cultural aversion to tribal heritage and to vernacular publications. Helping to forge the last of these constraints, struggle poets appropriated oral praises and the techniques of oral performance into their hybrid written poetry,⁹ but emptied their work of ethnic significance and wrote in English, which seemed to them to be ‘non-ethnic and unifying in the urban situation’ (Chapman 1996: 334). The shift in publishing geography evidenced in Chapman’s trajectory from rural to urban poetry, and from rural vernaculars to urban englishes, reflects the rise of struggle culture, whose producers came from and were concerned in their work to address audiences in townships and urban hostels.¹⁰

As noted, Manisi was schooled in the missionary tradition of liberalism and moderation, but he was nevertheless powerfully attached to traditional structures of authority and was critical of colonial and missionary motives. At the start of his public career in 1946, there seemed to Manisi to be no contradiction in his simultaneous dedication to chieftaincy and his membership of the ANC – both attachments seemed to the poet to promote black solidarity and dignity. Traditional leaders, many of them mission educated, had in fact helped to create and, initially, to lead the SANNC. Yet, as part of the polarisation of politics during apartheid, liberation organisations like the ANC increasingly distanced themselves from traditional politics, which they felt had become irrevocably tainted by apartheid as well as irrelevant to urban township life. In an interview with Opland (2005) in November 1985, Manisi explains his early nationalism as well as his response to Mathanzima’s support of the homeland programme, declaring that he confronted Mathanzima outspokenly on his support for the Nationalist government’s provision of power to chiefs rather than to the people.

For Manisi, the institution of chieftaincy existed to serve the unity and prosperity of the people, and did not preclude the necessity and agency of other political institutions at the multiracial national level. In the poet’s definition, tradition was that which fostered bonds of obligation, trust and common humanity among people. This sense of rural politics and custom was not inherently conservative, yet it was rendered conservative and dismissed by the binaried politics of apartheid. That many chiefs were in fact complicit with apartheid, and that the imbongi’s conventional freedoms were undermined in publishing and performance contexts by apartheid institutions and legislation, meant that appeals to chiefs – like those made by Manisi – were easily criticised for their apparent subscription to the political status quo. Whereas Manisi’s guiding principles made use of history in ways that owed a debt to his rural-based intellectual predecessors, urban resistance writers used history in new ways to reflect militant ideals. For example, like Mqhayi, Wauchope, Gqoba and many others, Manisi revered the prophet-convert Ntsikana, whose politics of black unity was moderate. In one of his historical poems for Opland, performed in 1970, Manisi excuses Ntsikana and blames Makana (otherwise known as Nxele, and by scholars today as Makhanda¹¹), Ntsikana’s contemporary and opponent, for ills that befell the Rharhabe. Resistance and protest writers preferred to enlist the example of Makana, however, because of his later rejection of Christianity and his abortive but brave attacks against colonial forces.¹² Chapman argues that ‘in the Black Consciousness poetry of the 1970s, Makana was given iconic significance as a figure of resistance while the political prison, Robben Island, was renamed the Isle of Makana’ (1996: 105).¹³

The rise of black city voices of resistance whose oppositional tactics were unlike Manisi’s in important respects, the appearance of a few brave publishers who would disseminate black writing in English, and a growing urban repudiation of rural-based tradition, seen as nothing more than backward, divisive practice, left Manisi intellectually and ideologically stranded, his terms of reference suddenly overburdened, his desired publics divided, and his personal loyalties out of synch with one another. Indeed, in making a special case for the Zulu poets who had adapted izibongo to trade union contexts and to print form, Ari Sitas implies the binary potentials of praise poetry during apartheid: these trade union poets ‘and their vernacular noises, their pushing outwards of the expressive resources of poetry in Zulu, are no apartheid adjustments, nor are they tribal embarrassments’ (1994: 152). In the eyes of these proletarian poets, Manisi, rural imbongi, was just such a ‘tribal embarrassment’. Constrained by narrow publishing imperatives, estranged from the primary subject of his early poetry, and increasingly isolated, intellectually and geographically, from the broad appeal and legitimacy of urban protest, Manisi nevertheless tenaciously pursued publication throughout his career. In the next chapter, I suggest how he reconceived of the mechanics of print publication as a way of writing for future audiences, which he tried to address in terms of their Xhosa and larger black identities. The remainder of this chapter explores Manisi’s conflicting attitudes to mutually implicating subjects – education, writing, black liberation and racial oppression – in order to suggest his reasons for valuing the written word despite his sense of its violent colonial origins.

Dignity, history, education and the record