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ОглавлениеIntroduction
In an obscure volume of Xhosa poetry entitled Inguqu (‘A Return to the Attack’), written by David Yali-Manisi and published in 1954, there appears a praise poem addressed to Chief Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela, a young Thembu chief who would become South Africa’s first democratically elected president 40 years after Manisi wrote him into poetry. Part character summation, part prophecy and exhortation, Manisi’s izibongo, or praise poem, for Mandela precedes its subject’s transformation into the major symbol around which anti-apartheid commitment would mobilise, and anticipates his future international importance. Although the poet identifies his subject as a royal chief, Manisi places Mandela in an African context of widespread upheaval, and praises him for his service to African groups within and beyond South African borders:
You’ve rendered services to Mbo and Nguni,
to Sotho and Tswana,
to Senzangakhona’s Zulu,
to Swazi and Ndebele,
to Shona, Nyasa, Kalanga;1
you’ve bridged nations great and small,
forging African unity:
all its nations are gripped in one birth pang. (71–72)2
As well as addressing Mandela with his traditional salutation, ‘Hail, Earth Tremor!’, Manisi creates a new and prophetic name for his chief, ‘Gleaming Road’, which predicts Mandela’s future influence:
Hail, Mandela’s gleaming road!
Nations name you Earth Tremor;
the poet names you Gleaming Road:
you set Africa blazing … (72)
Manisi suggests no contradiction in honouring his subject as a Thembu chief who is destined to cast off the signs of custom in order to transcend his Thembu identity. The poet observes:
Piercing needle,
handsome at Mthikrakra’s3 home,
ochre-daubed torso,
Mandela’s son.
Beads and loincloths become him,
Though ochre becomes him he spurns it:
If he’d used it, what might have happened? (72)
Beads, loincloths and ochre are the outward symbols of traditional identity and indicate participation in local codes and customs. Mandela is beautiful when adorned in the costume of his rural community, yet there is value in his refusing ochre, the sign of ‘Red’ identity whose wearers spurn outside groups.4 However, although he has rejected an exclusive Thembu identity, Mandela’s destiny is ordained, and he is given authority by his Thembu birth, as the final stanza attests:
Speak out boldly, son of Zondwa,5
uncowed by genets or wild cats!
Even if death’s in store,
you’ve been prepared to serve
as blood offering for blacks,
for you’re a royal prince.
You were born to bear these trials and burdens,
loads and loads stacked on loads.
May the Lord bless you,
grant you success
in confronting the lackeys of evil.
Let it be so, my chief. (73)
The plurality of circumstance, identity and choice represented by Mandela as a figure, and expressed in Manisi’s poem, are mirrored in different ways by the poet’s array of affiliations and beliefs. In the early 1950s, Manisi was both a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and the official imbongi, or praise poet, of Kaiser Mathanzima’s Thembu chiefdom in Transkei. He was a mission-educated Methodist whose Christianity accommodated ancestral veneration. Throughout his archived poetry, he demands a single South African education system, but he also expresses his wariness of Western culture and his wish to preserve local Xhosa forms of knowledge. His poetry speaks of the need to bring the light of education and Christianity to dark corners of Africa, while at the same time providing anti-colonial histories that interpret missionary activity as having participated in colonial brutality against indigenous populations. Manisi was a proud guardian of the isiXhosa language and of Thembu and Xhosa histories. He was also a pan-African dreamer inspired by the hope of widespread black solidarity. This book examines the ways in which Manisi’s recorded and translated izibongo reflect, resist and sometimes buckle beneath the strain of the identities and beliefs they expressed in the divisive and coercive contexts of apartheid South Africa.
Exceptionally talented, yet relatively little-known outside of the fields of oral and isiXhosa studies, David Manisi laboured in a range of unconducive environments to discharge the manifold duties of the praise poet. The art of the imbongi, as this book will try to show, demands a comprehensive literary, political and mystical mastery. Not least among the praise poet’s mandates is the work of authoritative genealogical mapping. Manisi’s poetry contains many references to lineages and ancestors, and a basic understanding of how these lines and names fit together helps one to read the poetry quoted in this book with greater insight, and also illuminates something of the complexity of association and identity characteristic of southern African communities. A brief note on some of the genealogies to which Manisi refers can be found in the Appendix. Suffice it here to note that the Thembu – to which Mandela belongs, as do Manisi and two important subjects of Manisi’s apartheid poetry, the homeland chief Kaiser Mathanzima and the rightful heir to the Thembu leadership, Sabatha Dalindyebo – are an isiXhosa-speaking group whose history is distinct from that of the main Xhosa line. Despite their distinct histories, however, as a response to colonial incursion, isiXhosa-speaking people began to see themselves increasingly as constituting one nation, which is popularly, if not strictly correctly, known as the Xhosa nation. In its rural manifestation, this ‘nation’ exists locally as chiefdoms with their roots in pre-colonial groups such as the Thembu.
As well as contending in his poetry with other forms of ‘the nation’, such as what might characterise a ‘South African people’, Manisi frequently invokes the ancestors of present-day Xhosa leaders from Thembu, Xhosa and other isiXhosa-speaking lines, all of which in his conception form part of one Xhosa nation. Sometimes these invocations instantiate the capacity of praise poetry, essentially a literature of identity and connection, to represent its subjects both in the microcosm of their homesteads as well as in the matrices of their many larger affiliations. At other times – often in Manisi’s archived poetry, I shall argue – recourse to exclusive affiliations reflects an external strain on the form which militates against the poet’s capacity to envisage, articulate and encourage connections among his constituencies. It is the work of this book to consider, as creatively as possible, how the pressures upon Manisi’s world affected, perhaps at times afflicted, the texts he made.
David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi was born at Khundulu Location, in Western Thembuland, on 17 September 1926. He was a member of the amaNcotsho, historically a distinguished warrior clan who were spear-bearers to the prestigious amaHala chiefs. Manisi was educated for short periods at Khundulu community school, at Freemantle and at Lovedale, the latter a mission school from which he was expelled in 1948 for having participated in an aggressive praising contest with a boy from a rival clan. Manisi continued his education at Mathanzima Secondary School, but had to leave and find work to support his family when his father became ill. He always regretted his lack of further education, as his poetry attests, and supplemented his learning with a rigorous programme of reading in ‘English, Xhosa and History’. It was ‘through this energetic reading’, the poet writes in his 1983 autobiographical notes, ‘that I acquired vast information about my people’s history and how she came to meet other peoples’ (Opland 2005: 18).
Between 1944 and 1945, before he was admitted to Lovedale, Manisi worked as a migrant labourer in the western Cape. After leaving Mathanzima Secondary School, he worked for six months in the eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth, one of South Africa’s most important industrial centres. Between 1951 and 1958, when he was ‘dismissed for [his] political ideas’, Manisi was a clerk in the Native Recruiting Corporation (Opland 2005: 18). In 1952 he joined the ANC and in the late 1950s he was the secretary of the ANC branch in Queenstown. In 1960, the year in which black organisations were banned in South Africa, Manisi spent five months in an East London prison for his political involvement, but upon his release continued to work for the ANC until Queenstown authorities harassed him to the point that he felt compelled to return to the Khundulu valley. Shortly after his return home, Manisi attempted to attend a conference in Paarl but was again arrested and imprisoned for three days. In his autobiographical sketch, Manisi mentions nothing of his connection to the ANC and political activism. He claims that he spent the decade between 1958 and 1968 farming (Opland 2005). In 1968, he returned to clerking, this time for the Hala Tribal Authority, which was headed by Chief Manzezulu Mthikrakra. Between 1974 and 1982, he was a clerk at the Labour and Lands offices in Lady Frere. Between 1952 and 1983 – in which years he was, for varying periods, Mathanzima’s imbongi, a migrant labourer, a farmer, a clerk, a political activist and, as we shall see, a fieldwork subject and university employee – Manisi was also a writer who published five original volumes of poetry (Yali-Manisi 1952, 1954, 1977, 1980, 1983). None of his books earned him money and all are now out of print. In the first part of his career, Manisi was widely acclaimed as a great poet. He rose to prominence at the age of 21 when, in 1947, he performed at the national Ntsikana Day celebrations6 in Grahamstown. His performance greatly impressed his audience: the organiser of the celebrations, JT Arosi, accorded him the title Imbongi Entsha (‘The new poet’), and invited him to perform at subsequent Ntsikana Day celebrations. Opland (2005) notes that Arosi’s choice of title for Manisi sets the poet in a special literary lineage: he had inherited the mantle of the great Xhosa imbongi, SEK Mqhayi. In the early part of his public career, then, Manisi earned the respect and recognition of his audiences and literary contemporaries, and was tacitly recognised as official imbongi to Chief Mathanzima.
In 1955, Manisi broke from Mathanzima, whose growing complicity with Pretoria was repugnant to the poet. However, he continued to perform at events of public significance, such as Mathanzima’s reception of an honorary doctorate at Fort Hare University in 1974, and Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations at Mthatha in 1976. In 1970, Manisi met Jeff Opland in the course of the scholar’s fieldwork expeditions in Transkei. Between 1970 and 1976, Opland recorded several poems by Manisi in fieldwork conditions as well as in ceremonial contexts. In 1977, Opland arranged for Manisi to perform at the Grahamstown Performing Arts Festival, attended largely by English-speaking audiences. This was the first in a long series of what Opland and Manisi termed their ‘lecture-demonstrations’. For five weeks in 1979, again through Opland’s intervention, Manisi became the Traditional Artist in Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where he performed for largely uncomprehending audiences with Opland present as lecturer and co-translator. Manisi’s increasing involvement with the university led to his publication of two volumes of original poetry under the auspices of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, as part of the Institute’s Xhosa Text Series.
Between 1982 and 1985, Manisi was a research officer at Rhodes where he continued to run lecture-demonstrations with Opland. He also went into the field to gather primary material and interview informants, and undertook the work of transcribing and translating other poets’ poetry. In this way, he gathered a first-hand understanding of some of the mediatory practices to which his own poetry was subjected for critical reading. The height of the academic part of his career came in 1988 when he was a Fulbright Scholar at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. There he produced poetry for American audiences, again under the rubric that he and Opland had worked out for mediating performance to audiences unfamiliar with the language and form in which they were addressed. After returning to South Africa, Manisi performed before English-speaking academic audiences for the last time in Durban at a conference on orality. Opland describes the two poems Manisi produced in Durban in July 1988 as his last performances. In June of 1988, the poet had taken up a post as a research officer at the University of Transkei (Unitra), where he had worked intermittently before. In a paper on Unitra’s post-apartheid institutional crisis, Adam Habib encapsulates the university’s woeful trajectory: ‘Established in 1977 by the homeland regime to showcase its newly found “independence” and create at least the façade of statehood, it is now a monument to apartheid’s folly’ (2001: 157–158). It is a telling ending to Manisi’s academic career that he should have found himself working for, and under the sign of, an educational institution able to provide him with isiXhosa-speaking audiences, yet so much the bitter fruit of apartheid. Despite his deteriorating health and his growing reliance on alcohol, Manisi may well have produced some poetry in the short time before his dismissal from Unitra. If he did perform izibongo in this period, no one has written of it and Opland’s archive bears no trace of it.
Despite the apparent variety of his employment record, Manisi was also frequently jobless, a casualty of the apartheid system despite his talents, and for much of the decade before his death in September 1999, he was unemployed, ill, destitute and silent as a performer and writer. He never performed in the ‘new’ South Africa. He never met Mandela. Despite the poet’s unrelenting efforts to find audiences, Mandela never knew, before Manisi died, of the 1954 poem addressed to Earth Tremor, and Manisi’s neighbours did not know whose gravesite Opland sought when he asked for directions to the burial place of the great imbongi who had lived among them. That Manisi died in total obscurity, no longer recognised as an imbongi in his own neighbourhood, suggests how far the poet’s reputation had receded from its early swell.
Manisi’s poetry was sensitive to the complexities of life in a country in which both he and his literary tradition were rooted. Although he desired peaceful coexistence in South Africa for all races, he was keenly aware of the historical injustices perpetrated against the Xhosa people, their political institutions and their land. In a remarkable 34-minute-long poem, performed at Opland’s request, Manisi gives his account of the pre-colonial traverse and use of land by isiXhosa-speaking communities, as well as the struggle over territory that followed colonial settlement and expansion in the Cape. He concludes by recounting the capture and removal to Robben Island of several important Xhosa chiefs who had defied colonial rule. This moment of colonial betrayal is the bedrock of Manisi’s political understanding. Throughout his poetry he is concerned with the restoration of land and dignity to the Xhosa people. While the pain of colonial dispossession runs through Manisi’s poetry like a dark valley, the poet offers education as the key to black liberation and he is uncompromising before academic audiences about their obligation to supply funding and opportunity for black learning. Despite the power of his poetic claims, however, the trajectory of his career – from widely admired poet of his chief’s court to little-known quasi-researcher, quasi-performer at academic institutions – suggests starkly the declining possibilities for his traditional address.
Manisi’s poetry attests to his divided desires: on the one hand, he yearned for the impossible restoration of an obliterated, pre-colonial community and landscape, while on the other, he argued for the need of finding ways in which all South Africans could come to coexist equally and peaceably. In his poetry, these different impulses are expressed in Manisi’s construction of his audiences as members of particular political communities. He frequently addressed his Xhosa listeners and invoked a wider Xhosa public with the name ‘Tribes of Phalo’, Phalo being one of the great Xhosa ancestors who ruled in pre-colonial times and who represents, in Manisi’s revisionist understanding, Xhosa independence.7 In performing for, or referring to, white audiences, Manisi spoke of ‘Tribes of Nonibe’, a title that carries the burden of the poet’s contradictory feelings about the multiracial national reality: Nonibe, the wife of a Ndlambe chief, was the daughter of a white woman who had been shipwrecked in the eighteenth century off the Pondoland coast. Out of loyalty to her mother, Nonibe offered protection to vulnerable white settlers (Mostert 1992; Opland 1998). In Manisi’s construction, the whites he addresses are culpable for the historical injustices perpetrated against the Xhosa by their settler ancestors. At the same time, however, the Xhosa are no longer the independent nation of the poet’s desire: they live in an irreversibly infiltrated landscape in which they too are responsible for the white presence. For Manisi, dispossession, deprivation and division is born among Africans as a consequence of colonisation.
This book focuses on Manisi’s public career in a study of the particular modes of address and textuality through which the poet laboured to communicate with his diverse audiences across the many cultural and linguistic divisions, geographies and political complexities of identity that define South African life. Manisi was committed to the political function of his art and sought always to appeal to his audiences, even when they could not understand the language of his poetry, as political agents who are duty bound to restore equilibrium and justice to the polities of which they are constituents. As a rural, Xhosa poet whose career spanned the apartheid period, Manisi performed and wrote in an increasingly polarised political context. On the one hand, Pretoria co-opted many of the imbongi’s customary terms of address – those related to ethnicity, rural identity, chieftainship and tradition – by artificially bolstering the power of chiefs and by proposing to ‘free’ rural geographies for black occupation and self-rule. On the other hand, the terms in which black resistance could legitimately be expressed were determined by the African nationalist liberation struggle, which increasingly eschewed the categories of ‘non-white’ identity that apartheid discourse had occupied and distorted, in favour of a revalorised, non-ethnic and inclusive black identity.
Poets like Manisi, who expressed local, rural and ethnic, as well as pan-African and nationalist identities in a form associated with the rural chieftaincy and in a language defined by Pretoria as ‘ethnic’, could find few sympathetic audiences among black nationalists and few rural contexts in which their freedom to criticise wrong behaviour and politics was respected. Manisi nevertheless used every opportunity he received to address Xhosa and other audiences: he wrote newspaper and book poetry in the hope of projecting his words into the large world of print circulation; he addressed Transkeian gatherings in the hope of persuading Mathanzima to return to the promise of his early leadership; he accepted various terms of employment at universities in South Africa and the United States of America so that he could exhort privileged audiences to share their resources with destitute Africans.
This book makes the case that Manisi demonstrated considerable ingenuity in addressing his difficult audiences and that he exploited the capacities of different media and of the praise poem genre to increase his chances of finding, and indeed helping to create, sympathetic publics. Nevertheless, the history of Manisi’s career, after its early promise, is one of frustration and marginalisation. After 1955, Manisi’s published poetry had no contemporary readership; after the mid-1950s, his Transkeian poetry compromised his political vision; and he was isolated by his later academic contexts, in which his English-speaking audiences provoked his anger and largely misunderstood his poetry. As a way of circumventing these failures, Manisi increasingly conceived of his poetry as a legacy that should be left to future publics; to this end he used the slim opportunities of book publication and academic enquiry to record his art as a durable product that could find new audiences in the future. The archive of his recorded and published poetry nevertheless encodes the difficulties Manisi faced in articulating his various loyalties, and testifies to the poet’s sense of the constraints on his freedom of expression. My engagement with the poet’s rich corpus of available poetry takes what might be understood as a primarily symptomatic approach to interpretation. I have ventured that many of Manisi’s poems for the record reveal their ‘affliction’ by their context of production. Rather than repeat the project undertaken by Opland and other scholars of Xhosa poetry, aimed at elaborating the genre, elucidating references and demonstrating how Xhosa praise poetry is instantiated by different poets, I hope to engage the scars in Manisi’s poetry – those sites of strain and damage and counter-efforts at repair at which a world and a poetic sensibility proved mutually inhospitable.
Praise poetry and the mandate of the praise poet
The institution of the praise poet, in its various forms throughout Africa, is widely recognised and respected.8 What links distinctive traditions across the continent under the common rubric of a special and pervasive African form is their mode of addressing and naming their subjects with epithets that are compact and allusive, and that often hint at, rather than detail, relationships and incidents. Names are the main components of the genre. Karin Barber explores the implications of this in her book on the anthropology of texts, persons and publics: ‘Names and their expansions are the kernel of social reputation, the index of self-realisation, and the vehicles of survival beyond death. Names are the nodes through which multiple links and affiliations with other names pass’ (2007: 135). That a praise poem is an assemblage of names which have such far-ranging functions within and beyond the scope of the life they identify suggests something of the complex ontology of the genre. A recognised praise poet in the Xhosa tradition, who is mandated to characterise the society and its leaders with particular authority, is a specialist in the recollection and recombination of established names as well as in the formulation of fresh designations.
Scholars agree that praise poets act as mediators who effect change by strengthening existing bonds and encouraging actions and attitudes based on values extrapolated from (reinvented) histories. The poetry itself is energetic, rousing and interspersed with bursts of dislocated narrative amidst epithet and metaphor. Each tradition of praise poetry has a distinctive style of performance: in the Zulu practice, for example, where considerable value is placed on memorising important izibongo for redeployment in new circumstances, recitation is fast-paced and breathtakingly impressive to the eye and the ear; in the spontaneous and improvisatory genre of Xhosa izibongo, the poet declaims more slowly and deliberately, in a gruff and growling voice. In both Zulu and Xhosa forms, the traditional poet might brandish spears with which he pierces the air to punctuate his poetry, and he is often dressed in skins that denote his clan affiliation.
The southern African praise poet has historically held a position of considerable political influence: inherent to his art is the licence to criticise with impunity those who come within his poetry’s purview. Leroy Vail and Landeg White (1991) have argued that poetic licence constitutes the common basis on which all southern African praise forms operate, whether they are traditionally oriented or popular adaptations. Although these writers contend that the licence is attached to the form and not to the performer, it seems more accurate to suggest that a performer cannot avail his poetry of the special political immunity dictated by convention unless he demonstrates his performance authority to the satisfaction of his audiences. The poet is always accountable both to the conventions of his form and to his audience, and so the most outspoken and valued praise poet creates for himself a reputation that is often widely proclaimed by his listeners.
Opland (1983, 1998) explains that the imbongi’s political role is focused on social regulation: on the task of persuading his audiences to moderate excessive behaviour according to the norms reflected in the balancing world of his poetry. In South Africa, the praise poet of the chiefdom is associated with the countryside – a rural hinterland in the imagination of politically dominant urban centres and, for urban-based industry, a repository of latent labour supply. In their urban adaptations of the izibongo form for worker and, more recently, large-scale national gatherings, worker praise poets have laboured to shed their associations with the paradigm of the chiefdom, and have established through their poetry new ‘communities’ of relation (the proletariat, the multicultural nation) within which to mediate and encourage stability. In the mid-1980s, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, trade union praise poets arose out of worker communities to mediate between unions and their ethnically heterogeneous labour constituencies. Although they used the rhythms, licences, naming functions and literary devices of rural izibongo, they explicitly eschewed connections to the traditional and to a politics based on heredity. They sought to establish themselves as popular exponents of a revamped, hybridised poetry that nevertheless carried the old aura of authority and legitimacy surrounding the traditional form.
Rural iimbongi – who from the onset of black urbanisation travelled to cities to perform at events of significance to their rural communities, such as when a chief visited gatherings of his migrant labourer constituents at their urban accommodation – have had to contend with many threats to the integrity and legitimacy of their rural polity since colonial settlement and, perhaps most acutely because of the pace and brutality of change, during the apartheid era. In his epic account of the frontier wars fought between the Xhosa and colonists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Noel Mostert argues that when the Xhosa encountered colonial expansion in the Cape, they ‘found themselves selected by history. Upon them fell the brunt of the experience of contact, violent or otherwise, with the outside world. It changed them forever, and set them quite apart in experience and outlook …’ (1992: 185). In Xhosa poetry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which exists now either in transcription or as it was published in early Xhosa newspapers, it is clear that iimbongi were profoundly conscious of happenings in foreign nations, and of ways in which foreigners affected isiXhosa-speaking communities.
Manisi’s poetry, although it was produced during the apartheid era, focuses on colonial encounter, and refers repeatedly to settler communities: British, Boer, French and Germans. Crises inflicted upon rural paradigms by colonial and apartheid regimes are often juxtaposed in critical analysis and, indeed, in many of Manisi’s poems, by an oversimplified model of pre-colonial history and politics, which was in fact fraught with wars, dispossessions and regroupings. These regroupings happened in a fairly fluid space of identity politics in which defections and immigrations were usual. It took the arrival of colonial modes of social and political organisation to delimit identity in more rigid ways, according to ‘tribe’, ‘race’ and geographical location across an evolving urban–rural divide. The eminent historian Terence Ranger, who argued path-breakingly for an approach to African history that takes into account strategies of African resistance, has cautioned that what we tend to neglect in our evaluations of colonial and apartheid intervention in indigenous life is ‘the great disruption involved in drastically narrowing down the African religious, social and economic world while at the same time enlarging the administrative and political’ (1996: 274).
The shape and composition of rural communities have thus been subject to considerable upheaval from pre-colonial times, but in order to deal with the rapidity and scale of change since the wars of colonial dispossession and the concomitant adaptations made by praise poets to their art, scholars have tended to depict the pre-colonial polity as stable and characterised by widespread consensus. What this dichotomy obscures, in addition to larger historical realities, is the daily content of life in pre-colonial communities. Although kinship ties connected groups, strangers and non-relations were always also present among familial communities. Kinship groups were not isolated units – they engaged constantly with one another and dignitaries from one group attended the significant events that took place at the Great Places9 of both neighbouring and far-flung chiefdoms. What was important for some time before colonial occupation was the institution of chieftaincy: representing powerful ancestors, the figure of the hereditary chief provided many southern African polities with a shared political vocabulary and value system.
For the Xhosa, the chief ‘represented the principal force that embodied their communal life and held them together, namely veneration of their ancestors, as well as loyalty to and respect for the bloodlines that bound families, chiefdom and nation’ (Mostert 1992: 198). According to the social anthropologist David Hammond-Tooke, the chief was the:
[s]upreme lawgiver and the head of the administrative system … his court is the final court of appeal for the cases from local courts. He controls the wealth of the tribe and leads the army in war. He is, in fact, the symbol of tribal unity; in his person all the complex emotions which go to form the solidarity of the tribe are centred – he is the tribe. (1954: 34)
To this description, Harvey Campion adds that the chief was ‘commander-in-chief, economic leader, high priest, chief medicine man and spokesman for his people’ (1976: 77). These characterisations reveal why the chief was central both as leader and as institution to Xhosa politics and poetics. But chiefs did not have unlimited powers over their communities. Mostert (1992: 199) shows that a chief’s constituents held him accountable to public feeling and custom in important ways and that because of ‘the dispersed and informal nature of Xhosa society and the lack of any central apparatus through which absolute power could be wielded’, the chief was never free to act as a tyrant. His court was presided over by powerful councillors whom he was bound by custom to consult on all matters of importance, and if he dared impose unilateral and unpopular measures he faced desertion by members of his polity who could, and often did, defect to other chiefdoms. The pervasive ideal, popularly quoted and still in memory today, was that a chief was a chief by virtue of his people – as much as they vested their corporate identity and spirituality in him, so he depended on them for their loyalty and support.
In this political context, the praise poet’s art was one of the valuable means by which the polity’s dissatisfactions and demands could be communicated to the chief. The imbongi also transmitted the people’s great love and respect for their leader and his ancestors. It is as this essential line of communication between people and chief, and as the mystical poet of connection between the living and the dead, that the imbongi enters scholarship. Historically, Xhosa iimbongi affirmed the institution of chieftaincy and strengthened the polity by invoking the grace and favour of the ancestors who were held to have powerful influence over the deeds and fates of the living. But the poet also addressed the chief in terms that confirmed his many obligations to his ancestors and polity, so that the imbongi must be interpreted as a defender of the interests of the community as a whole.
The imbongi may expand the ambit of his poetry considerably. He may, for instance, choose to declaim on the subject not of a person but of an event or a practice of considerable importance and comment on its significance to the gathering and the wider polity. For example, Melikaya Mbutuma, a contemporary of Manisi’s, performed a series of poems at a public health meeting in 1976 extolling the value of good agricultural practices as well as of the breakfast cereal Pronutro, which he praised for the range of nutrients it could provide to the poor. His poems for the occasion, transcriptions of which are held in the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, included wide-ranging references to the audience, to the educators at the meeting, and to the various agents – including corrupt chiefs and government policies – responsible for the poverty and hunger that had caused the desperate need for such a gathering. Despite the usefulness of the idea of the imbongi as a mediator, the activity of izibongo is in fact far more energetic and multi-directional, concerned with igniting the heart and alighting on the imagination with multiple suggestions of connection. All izibongo, including urban variants, spark with varied focus and address: in one performance the imbongi might call on leaders, ancestors, audience, broader polity, historical communities, imagined gatherings, foreign nations, star constellations, and God. The purpose is for any single addressee to see her/himself suddenly in one, and then another, and still another circle of identity, obligation and belonging so that something of the potential of community can be communicated and affirmed in the space of the poet’s performance. Karin Barber suggests very richly the operation of the realm of the potential in praise poetry when she writes that praise poems construct ‘paths that are kept open to allow the flow of beneficence between beings’ (1991: 290).
One of the most important effects of the kind of address that defines praise poetry lies in the audience’s re-imagination of itself in terms of historical and potential identities, as well as in relation to other communities. It is this facet of the form that gives it both its affirmative potentials and its transformative capacities. Rather than simply hinging on a contextual model of polity, then, praise poetry is defined by its intrinsically imaginative mode of plural address, and it is this mode of address that gives the form its applicability in altered circumstances. Anxieties about the future of praise poetry, expressed by eminent scholars in the field such as Archie Mafeje (1963, 1967) in his seminal articles of the 1960s, Liz Gunner in several commentaries (1986 and 1999, for instance), and Jeff Opland and Russell Kaschula in their separate studies, range from questioning whether oral modes in general can survive the spread of literacy and newer media technologies, to registering concern about whether apartheid censorship of poets and state co-optation of traditional structures of leadership and community will fatally transform or silence traditional izibongo. The foundational assumption of this study is that it is not the form of the polity alone that nourishes the praise poet or threatens his art with extinction. The broadening of the community – into a multiracial, multicultural polity for instance – does not by definition threaten the genre’s capacity to address, characterise and call into being an appropriate audience or public. Rather, the praise form founders when its addressees comprise actual and imagined publics that are characterised by strained, tenuous and inequitable relations, and when there is a polarised politics at work – of oppression and its opposite (the dominant counter-discourse of resistance) during apartheid – which narrows legitimate modes of address, and constrains the poet’s ability to imagine and validate legitimate identities that fall between or beyond the binary in struggle. The essence of the form from pre-colonial times to the present is not its ability to decide unchanging identity but rather to accommodate the human complexity of connection and mutability.
Discourses of domination and the uses of ‘tradition’
In South Africa, the imposition of colonial claims to land and authority and of apartheid minority rule gave rise to vocabularies of identity and belonging that managed the black majority and legitimated white domination. In the late 1980s, anthropologists Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp edited an influential book entitled South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts (1988) in which a variety of political terms were scrutinised in order to assess how colonial and apartheid rule had distorted and refashioned their applications. In his introduction to the book, Sharp argues that the South African terms associated with group identity – such as ‘tribe’, ‘race’, ‘ethnic group’, ‘tradition’ – in fact ‘constitute a discourse about the nature of South African society, which reveals the logic and serves the interests of those who wield power. They form, in other words, a discourse of domination in South Africa’ (Sharp 1988: 6). It is this coercive language of belonging and difference that explained the need for and the mode of apartheid segregation, and that was used to co-opt and corrupt rural institutions.
The idea of the tribe was a colonial invention which failed to acknowledge the highly interrelated nature of African societies. On the one hand, the idea that Africans were members of ‘neatly bounded “tribal” or “traditional” societies’ allowed colonials to imagine that the world was arranged into groupings that were similar to, although considerably simpler than, European nation states, and which consequently needed ‘civilising’ (Sharp 1988: 4). The colonial construct of ‘tribe’, as Terence Ranger (1983) has shown, was internalised by indigenous people and applied to their societies so that Africans themselves ‘invented’ tribes as mirror images of the European idea. In Sharp’s summary, ‘[t]his process, by which the representations of the dominators are assimilated by the dominated, and pressed into service in their dealings with the former … is an important theme in the politics of [apartheid] South Africa’ (Sharp 1988: 5).
Peter Skalnik, one of the contributors to South African Keywords, suggests that the concept of ‘tribe’, which gave rise to related terms like ‘tribalism’ and ‘tribal’, enabled white South Africans to think of their black countrymen/women as being primitive, as belonging to distinct groups (although how to define these groups was always problematic), and as engaging in ‘tribal’ conflict as a consequence not of socio-political factors but of their ‘tribal’ identities. At the same time, ‘tribe’ had ‘become a powerful idiom for [many black people’s] expression of political affiliation and difference’ (Skalnik 1988: 69), while for yet other black South Africans, particularly those who had moved over to urban economies, the appropriation of ‘tribe’ by the apartheid lexicon – for some time ‘tribe’ supplied the broad category of ‘race’ with manageable and exploitable subdivisions – incited strong resistance to the category. That David Manisi hoped to use ‘tribe’ in his poetry in a way that evaded its negative apartheid construction does not mean that his izibongo would be interpreted to fit his intention. In his autobiographical notes, Manisi responds to the idea that the Thembu were not historically members of the original Xhosa line by castigating those who ‘encourage the evil spirit of tribalism to crack and crush the black people’s unity for the achievement of their own unblessed ends’ (Opland 2005: 19–20). For Manisi, tribes were expressions of African pride and nodes of special attachment to the local and the familial that enhanced rather than destroyed an overarching African identity. For many black South Africans like Manisi, commitment to particular, locally based identities did not preclude a deep attachment to the idea of national citizenship. This movement among a variety of affiliations was dismissed by the urban-based nationalist resistance because of the ease with which any loyalty to ‘tribe’ or ‘clan’ or chief might be considered to support apartheid’s divisive vocabulary and agenda.
In the 1950s, Sharp writes, ‘the concepts of “race” and “tribe” were supplemented by a new vision of “ethnic groups” and “nations” as the basic building blocks of South Africa’ (1988: 7). Each ethnic group, the government claimed, was defined by its own language, culture, beliefs and tradition, and should develop as a group in its own territory. Ethnicity thus provided the ‘moral’ and ‘scientific’ basis for the apartheid strategy of ‘divide and rule’, and ‘separate but equal’ development. In its 1913 Natives Land Act, the Union government of South Africa had demarcated land for use as ‘native reserves’. The purpose of the Act was to prevent black inhabitants of the Union from encroaching on land belonging to whites, and to prevent blacks from owning land in areas set aside for whites. Apartheid rule re-imagined these reserves as ‘homelands’ for groups of black South Africans who would evolve from being members of tribes into ethnic populations which would eventually gain ‘independence’ from South Africa. In practice, as social anthropologist Martin West has pointed out, legislation pertaining to ethnic identity and organisation created populations that did ‘not fit neatly with the national states created’ for them: the Xhosa, for instance, were split across two homelands, the Ciskei and Transkei, and in Transkei, Sotho groups lived among the Xhosa (1988: 107). The ‘impurity’ and imprecision that actually attended apartheid ethnicity is evident from the categories according to which people were classified into groups: citizenship of Transkei was determined by birth, domicile, language, ‘being related to’, ‘identified with’, or ‘culturally or otherwise associated with’ the Transkei nation.10
In his controversial book about the legacy of late colonialism in Africa, Mahmood Mamdani argues that ‘[a]s a form of rule, apartheid … fractured the ranks of the ruled along a double divide: ethnic on the one hand, urban–rural on the other’ (1997: 21). Rural homelands and rural leaders, in the form of chiefs, were central to the government’s divide and rule strategy. Several commentators have elucidated the ways in which apartheid governments used the term ‘tradition’ to claim the naturalness and authenticity of the rural nations they wished to create. Since colonial times and the institution of the lexicon of ‘tribe’, the juxtaposition of ‘traditional’ African society and ‘modern’ European society supported the notion that South Africa was a bifurcated society comprising a primitive black majority and a progressive, civilised white minority. The specific location of ‘tradition’ was the rural hinterland, which, since British colonial rule, had been governed by customary law, as administered by ‘tribal authorities’, rather than by civil law, which governed urban society.
Colonial annexation of Transkei between 1879 and 1894 led to the division of chiefdoms into districts presided over by white magistrates, and locations governed by local headmen. This system was intended to destroy the power of chiefs who had resisted and warred with colonial forces. The apartheid homeland policy sought to ‘revive’ the power of chiefs who would support Pretoria’s strategies. In their book about Transkei under Kaizer Mathanzima’s rule, Barry Streek and Richard Wicksteed remark of the homeland policy that it ‘transformed chiefs – theoretically at least the guardians of the interest of their people – into loyal, government-paid officials’ (1981: 18). Although Pretoria claimed that the restoration of the chieftaincy was in line with ‘tradition’, government ethnologists were charged with the job of investigating genealogical claims made by those who applied to have their titles restored. If applicants proved pleasing to government, they were given invented administrative positions with little muscle.
The actual mechanisms of chiefly rule under apartheid were thus apartheid inventions rather than revivals of established custom. But just as ‘ “[t]raditionality” had been a means of legitimating a racially discriminatory system, it now became a resource used by those Africans who stood to benefit from the apartheid system’ (Spiegel & Boonzaier 1988: 50). It is this co-operation between government and government-appointed chiefs, both claiming the authority of ‘tradition’, that enraged and diminished praise poets like Manisi and his contemporary, Melikaya Mbutuma. The ideal of a chieftaincy mandated by and responsible to the rural polity existed in abstraction, at considerable distance from quotidian experience in rural areas. Manisi’s efforts to articulate the values inherent in fair and ‘traditional’ chieftaincy were not only policed for their compliance with the prescribed apartheid interpretation of such terms, but were also burdened by apartheid’s appropriation of the institution of chieftaincy and the discourses of ‘tradition’, ‘tribe’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’.
Pretoria’s strategy of granting independence to homelands enabled the apartheid vocabulary to absorb yet another term of resistance: ‘decolonisation’. Government argued that in ‘returning’ land to black ‘nations’ it was participating in the process of returning to Africans what colonials had removed from them. Manisi’s focus on colonial occupation, and his repeated calls for the return of land and institutions of self-rule that belong to the Xhosa by right and tradition, have force and validity when received on their own terms and in historical perspective. However, the rural poet’s speech was vulnerable to the agenda of the dominant discourse of apartheid rule in two ways: first, it used the categories of identity and legitimacy that had been appropriated by Pretoria, and second, because the rural poet communicated these identities in his African mother tongue, his speech appeared to support apartheid’s invention of language-based ‘ethnicity’.
African nationalist and Africanist discourses
The 1940s and 1950s were formative years both in Manisi’s life and in the history of the black struggle against segregation and apartheid. In the 1940s, a group of young nationalists, among them Mandela, formed the Congress Youth League (CYL) and began to influence the ANC leadership. Initially avowedly Africanist in their thinking, by the early 1950s Youth Leaguers had modified their position to accommodate class-based analysis. In publicising the Defiance Campaign,11 the Youth Leaguers employed some Africanist rhetoric: a Johannesburg CYL spokesman, for example, addressed his audience as ‘you who are young and whose blood is hot’ and urged them to ‘catch the bull by its horns, Afrika’ (in Lodge 1983: 44). Most of the Defiance Campaign discourse, however, related to ‘sacrifice, martyrdom [and] the triumph of justice and truth’ (in Lodge 1983: 44).
In the eastern Cape, more people were arrested as a consequence of their involvement in the Defiance Campaign than in all the other provinces combined: 5 941 out of a national total of 8 326, according to the historian Tom Lodge (1983: 46). Lodge argues that support for the ANC was so sizeable in that province for several reasons, including ‘the ethnic homogeneity of the local population; the deep historical roots of modern political culture’ (1983: 46–47), and the persistence of strong anti-colonialism among people descended from the protagonists of first contact with Europeans. Manisi was typical of the ANC’s eastern Cape supporters in his sense of the history that supplied the black cause with moral legitimacy. The ANC’s rhetoric, especially in the 1950s, was conciliatory and sought to influence a segment of the white population by stressing the moral importance of the black experience. A conciliatory attitude and vision is evident in much of Manisi’s poetry, but also present in the poet’s historical emphasis is his dissatisfaction with the compromises attendant on negotiation and multicultural cohabitation. Manisi’s Africanist discourse bears similarities to that of the dissident Congress Africanists who in the 1950s abandoned the ANC to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The PAC’s vision, Lodge argues, can be traced back ‘to an essentially peasant outlook’ (1983: 83). For the PAC, the issue of the land and its return to black people was central. Pan-Africanists regarded South Africa as a colonial country that had to be retrieved on the battleground of race, rather than class, by Africans alone. Ethnic nationalism was their tool of resistance, and was to be the means by which South Africa took up its part in Africa’s common destiny.
The banning of African political parties in 1960, and the occurrence of the Sharpeville and Langa massacres in the same year, changed the political direction of black activism from protest to armed insurgency. The armed wings of the ANC and PAC engaged in sabotage attacks against strategic white targets. Poqo, the PAC militia, was the more violent actor and trafficked in the rhetoric of masculinity and anti-colonialism that frequently appears in Manisi’s izibongo. This is not to suggest, however, that Manisi was a PAC supporter, but rather that his poetry spoke in a plural discourse, aspects of which were popularised in the armed struggle in support of very different ideologies from those Manisi espoused. Indeed, Poqo condemned chiefs, and was anti-religious and highly authoritarian in the regions of its influence. Manisi, by contrast, followed the ANC discourses of Christianity and democracy but, unlike the ANC or the PAC, he also supported the ideal of chieftaincy and rejected violence in favour of negotiation. Lodge’s account of black politics in apartheid South Africa suggests that, while organisations like the ANC often tried to harness and organise rural action, most rural resistance was highly localised. According to Colin Bundy, ‘[l]ocal and particularist “traditional” or “inherent” ideological currents flowed with – and sometimes flowed against – broader, more “structured” or “derived” beliefs and aims’ (1987: 255). Bundy’s account of rural protest in Transkei between 1920 and 1960 argues that the struggles of rural communities ‘were not, of course, waged by “pure” peasant movements: there was a significant interplay between rural grievances shaping local resistance and the efforts of political organisations centred elsewhere to articulate, link and broaden these struggles’ (1987: 255). Manisi’s poetry, although it was concerned with the national question, was in part a localised response to the conditions of life in rural Transkei.
The poet’s focus on equal education, for example, stems both from the crucial role learning had played in eastern Cape history, and from Manisi’s outrage at apartheid’s institution of Bantu Education in 1953, which brought into being a parallel and inferior system of education for ‘non-whites’. The Xhosa were the first black South Africans to receive mission education, and qualification for the limited franchise that was granted until 1936 to a minority of black people under the Cape liberal system depended in part on education. As Chapter 1 details, many of Manisi’s literary predecessors received education of a high standard at Lovedale, and black inhabitants of the eastern Cape saw education as a primary means of social mobility. Lodge details the extent of the resistance shown by the Cape Teachers’ Association against Bantu Education, and argues that ‘teachers in rural communities during the 1950s were potentially the natural leaders of opposition to authority … it is no coincidence that the Bantu Education boycott movement [of 1955] had its most significant rural impact in the eastern Cape and adjoining reserves’ where a premium had long been placed on education (1983: 119). Resistance to the government’s Bantu Education scheme was widespread and, after the 1976 Soweto uprisings in which student marches were brutally put down by police, changed the course of black politics in South Africa. But Manisi’s account of education, while it coincides with the national struggle against Bantu Education and is itself partly a response to Bantu Education, is best understood in the context of the historical Xhosa relationship to mission schooling. It is this context that explains something of the poet’s faith in proper education, and his repeated appeals to educated white benefactors to reform the education system. Manisi’s concern with education echoes the old African elite’s efforts to reform South Africa from within. Urban struggles led by students and pupils were more revolutionary in nature.
The university student uprisings of the 1970s were influenced by the rise of the new, urban-based rhetoric of Black Consciousness (BC), which ‘washed over the boundaries of purely political concerns to infuse the patois of African petty-bourgeois culture with a fresh bitter assertiveness’ (Lodge 1983: 324). BC discourse revitalised township literature in the 1970s and demarcated the boundaries of an acceptable and authoritative language of resistance: although this language had much to say about the black man’s emasculation in apartheid contexts, the black man was a black everyman who represented the combined African, Indian and coloured South African community. Reference to ethnic difference was not legitimate. Catchphrases in the slick, tough lexicon of urban-speak distinguished BC discourse as a language of the township and the city. As Lodge perceptively notes, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) represents ‘the coming of age, despite the institutions of apartheid, of a new African petty bourgeoisie’ (1983: 325).
In a paper about the progression in black South African thought from identity grounded in liberation to identity based on citizenship, CRD Halisi remarks that BC philosophy, ‘by providing an alternative to psychological complicity with racial oppression, could expedite the subjective prerequisites needed for black liberation’ (1997: 75). Urban black nationalists, whether they were ‘multiracial unionists’ or ‘black republicans’, perceived the need to refuse ‘ethnic’ categories and stress black unity as a way of resisting apartheid. Despite his many sojourns to cities for work, Manisi was to remain a peasant poet who was strongly attached both to the national cause and to the rural, Xhosa polity. In his poetry, which deals in the complex intersections of belonging and identity, Manisi could not banish ‘ethnicity’ or ‘tribe’ from his lexicon. This does not mean that his poetry was intentionally divisive: he exhorted black unity as fervently as urban black nationalists did. But the rural imbongi of the chiefdom, whose literary heritage and terms of address were compromised by their association with the institutions and discourses that apartheid had co-opted, was a tainted creature in the eyes of his urban counterparts.
Recent revaluations
Focusing on the archival traces of Manisi’s public career, this book is a response to several suggestions made by post-apartheid texts that have sought to revalue marginalised literatures and revitalise the discourses of identity in South Africa. In his challenging and controversial study, Southern African Literatures, literary historian Michael Chapman argues for the centrality of the praise poem in a revised southern African literary history. He argues that while the form is concerned with questions of power, it is also ‘about the insecurities and mobilities of change’ (Chapman 1996: 55), and that these latter subjects give us ways of ‘reading’ praise poems in contexts of struggle and transformation. Like Chapman, the literary scholar Duncan Brown (1998) investigates the way in which praise poems speak to present contexts even when they deal with historical relationships or when, as in the Zulu tradition, they are memorised sets of praises redeployed in contemporary circumstances. Both Chapman and Brown focus on memorial traditions of poetry and perhaps pay overmuch attention to famous historical poems, like Shaka’s izibongo, at the expense of more recent performance careers. Nevertheless, these writers urge us to expand the study of praise poetry in the broad national literary domain so that South Africa’s many literatures can be understood in relation to one another and to the social context as a whole. They argue more generally that the researcher has a duty to social justice, and that recuperative studies of neglected works, which might be valued for their alternative perspectives and modes of speaking, constitute valuable ways of promoting intercultural understanding. More recently, studies such as Chris Thurman’s (2010) book about the influential but not unproblematic South African poet and literary critic, Guy Butler, suggest new possibilities for the paradigm in terms of which one might reconsider a literary career and its relation to its era. Rather than working from the heady notion so dominant immediately post-apartheid that criticism ought to recuperate neglected work, later writers consider their task to be one of reassessment, an orientation that takes for granted a far broader literary history and textual field.
Two popular texts have encouraged this study with their discussion of praise poetry in relation to questions about belonging and self in contemporary South Africa. The first and principal of these is Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), in which the author recalls two performances of izibongo that remained in his memory and shaped his ideas about national and ethnic identities. His first experience of praise poetry was when the famous Xhosa imbongi, SEK Mqhayi, performed at his school. Mandela describes his confused but powerful reaction to the intersecting identities articulated and endorsed by the great poet:
I did not want ever to stop applauding. I felt such intense pride at that point, not as an African, but as a Xhosa … I was galvanised, but also confused by Mqhayi’s performance. He had moved from a more nationalistic, all-encompassing theme of African unity to a more parochial one addressed to the Xhosa people, of whom he was one … In a sense, Mqhayi’s shift in focus mirrored my own mind because I went back and forth between pride in myself as a Xhosa and a feeling of kinship with other Africans. (1994: 40)
What Mandela is struck by is the characteristic density and enigmatic nature of praise poetry. Later in the autobiography, he describes an occasion at which a Zulu imbongi recited Shaka’s izibongo for an audience of political prisoners in a Johannesburg penitentiary:
Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country and our people … In that moment we felt the hand of the great past that made us what we are and the power of the great cause that linked us all together. (Mandela 1994: 189)
These extracts suggest the ways in which praise poetry inspires both narrow and broad allegiances.
Antjie Krog’s memoir, A Change of Tongue (2003), is concerned with how an Afrikaans poet and journalist can learn to live and write poetry as a member of a multiracial and democratic South Africa. Concerned with translation as a way of living in multicultural, multilingual societies, and seeking out the voices and wisdoms of rural places, Krog devotes considerable attention to the figure of the praise poet. She also recounts a seminar she attended at which the lecturer performed an English translation of Manisi’s 1954 poem for Mandela (Krog 2003). There is in this series of mediations – Krog’s transcription and use of a performed translation of a written praise poem presently unavailable to audiences in its original isiXhosa – much to ponder about Manisi’s efforts at entextualisation and textual preservation, as well as about how texts in fact survive or fail.
In his timeline of important South African literary moments, Chapman includes the publication of Manisi’s first book in 1952. Whereas Jeff Opland has written extensively about Manisi in relation to the field of Xhosa literature – a rich territory of oral and written texts that Opland has done more than any other critic to map, track, describe and animate with recorded or retrieved texts12 – my study is concerned with filling out Chapman’s abbreviated insertion of Manisi’s poetry into the national literature, as well as considering the impact of the broad context of his day on Manisi’s practice of his form. Oral poetry, and indeed this is true of Manisi’s output, is usually the provenance of scholars from departments of African languages. In his review of critical work on apartheid politics, Mamdani identifies a ghettoised body of scholarship concerned with chieftaincy and rural administration ‘whose findings and insights are seldom integrated into a comprehensive analysis of the state’ (1997: 28). Similarly, several influential anthropologists and historians have argued that the rural sphere has been misunderstood and marginalised in general South African histories to the detriment of a fuller understanding of the country’s intersecting communities and identities. Disciplinary domains in South Africa have tended to emulate these unfortunate divisions: oral and folklore studies in African language departments have focused largely on rural forms, and literary and cultural studies, as embodied, for example, in departments of English in South African universities, have given their energies to urban forms.
In literary and cultural studies, scholars have given considerable attention to popular forms, as Karin Barber (1987) urged them to do in her seminal study ‘Popular Arts in Africa’. Popular forms flourished in townships in response to apartheid rule, and literary departments have for some time researched and taught hybrid forms like Soweto poetry, Staffrider and Drum stories, as well as trade union praise poetry. But rural forms, even when they were performed for urban audiences as in Manisi’s career, were tainted for many literary critics by their ‘traditional’ status. In her review of Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael’s (2000) book about South African cultural studies, Barber summarises the historical attitudes of such disciplines:
Throughout struggle against apartheid, cultural forms were recognised as weapons or sites of resistance, on the one hand, and as instruments of hegemonic control or sites of repression on the other. Cultural analysis under apartheid tended to be a sharply focused assessment of the extent to which each text or artefact promoted or retarded the liberation struggle. (2001: 178)
Just as urban, popular forms largely repudiated rural politics and terms of address because they had been appropriated by apartheid discourse, so literary studies often treated traditional forms as irrelevant or even detrimental to the liberation cause. More broadly, in some influential postcolonial theory like that produced by Homi Bhabha, traditionalism is figured as being uncritically patriotic and atavistic. Given credibility, Bhabha argues, ‘its language of archaic belonging marginalises the present’ (1990: 317). Now that there is space for broader investigations than those allowed by the demands of the struggle period, the ‘traditional’ is threatened with fresh forms of reification, such as the tourist industry’s marketing strategy of selling ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ vacation geographies to local and foreign holidaymakers. Cultural critic and creative writer Ari Sitas expressed his concern in a 1986 interview that in this environment praise poetry is subject to simultaneous canonisation and reification. Liz Gunner summarises the argument: ‘It is marginalized in the sense that it has lost its proactive role and its involvement in the making of a nation,’ but equally, it is being canonised ‘because it is seen as an important ingredient of what is perceived as exportable to the outside world as “South African culture”. So the praise poet – like biltong and the protea – is part of the South African identity package’ (1999: 58).
However, there are other contemporary engagements with the ‘traditional’ that give impetus to this book. Post-apartheid legislation on traditional leadership and governance, for example, sets out the roles and powers of chiefs in contemporary South Africa, and reflects state acknowledgement of the significance to the national paradigm of rural politics. And indicated earlier, several literary projects of the last decade such as those by Gunner and Gwala (1991), Chapman (1996) and Brown (1998), as well as public performances and popular publications that have been raising questions about rural and traditional influences, all make space for renewed evaluations of specific examples of the ‘traditional’. I focus on the work of Chapman, Brown and Gunner because the directions they provide reflect their productive institutional orientation as scholars who have been located in literary departments with strong interests in oral studies. If we are to take seriously oral forms and rural artists, we must work to overcome not only how we think about the urban and the rural, the traditional and the popular, but also how we get past the unusually and unproductively fierce division of expertise and subject matter between literary studies and the broader constellation of anthropologists, linguists, African language disciplines and historians that comprise oral studies in South Africa. In international oral studies circles there has long been a call for an interdisciplinary approach to performance texts (I am thinking particularly of Karin Barber and Paolo de Moraes Farias in their important 1989 edited collection of papers). But in South Africa the separation of disciplines has been particularly severe, in line with the kinds of political polarities I have been discussing.
This book deals with the poetry of one oral poet. Whereas literary studies has traditionally seen value in careful attention to the individual artist, studies of oral texts have tended to produce explanations of genres, forms and their modes of operation in society. The ascendancy of ethnographic, anthropological and sociological influences is evident in this approach. The relatively small sub-field of Xhosa oral poetry has been dominated by Opland’s main studies, Xhosa Oral Poetry (1983) and Xhosa Poets and Poetry (1998). Russell Kaschula’s The Bones of the Ancestors are Shaking: Xhosa Oral Poetry in Context (2002) focused on post-apartheid izibongo. These books investigate the practice and purpose of Xhosa oral forms as a whole from the vantage point of original fieldwork. The products of the fieldwork are sometimes published, such as in Kaschula’s (2002) collection of Bongani Sitole’s izibongo, or they get lodged in libraries as archival material, much of which falls immediately silent.
While literary critics are no doubt overly conscious of the life of print, they can contribute usefully to oral studies by considering the potentials of transcriptions. Brown, for example, argues for maintaining the dialectic between a text’s ‘past significance’ and its ‘present meaning’ (1998: 2) – a strategy that commonly informs literary reading practices. In the context of an oral text, this dialectic involves interpreting performance as a phenomenon that acted in specific circumstances of production and reception and that accrues a new life and textuality, a new ontology, in print. In transcription, recorded texts address new publics and speak in ways that bear traces, sometimes entirely obscure to later receivers, of their oral context but they are also open to negotiation in their new circumstances of reception. It is this alternative world of interpretation for which Manisi hoped in his book writing and in his agreement to the recording of his poetry for academic analysis.
There is a danger, however, in focusing questions about textuality solely on the categories of performance, transcription and linguistic translation. Even in the paradigm of performance, oral poems operate in fundamentally different ways depending on the conditions of their production and reception. In his 1964 guide for fieldworkers, the ethnographer Kenneth Goldstein suggested differences between natural contexts of performance in which artists address their ‘normal’ audiences, and degrees of artificiality in context where academics intervene to record or even precipitate circumstances for the production and recording of texts. Ruth Finnegan proposes a more subtle account of the academic effect on context by interrogating the category of the ‘natural’: she argues that all social events and performances are constructed, and that tacit claims by researchers about their access to ‘natural’ contexts elide important questions about the intrusion of the fieldworker. She concludes, however, that ‘there are clearly degrees of artificiality’ (Finnegan 1992: 77). To take examples from Manisi’s archive, there are significant differences between those poems performed for Opland at the scholar’s request, those performed at political events at which Opland just happened to be present, and those performed in the course of joint teaching projects. These differences relate to questions about audience composition and capacity for understanding, performance purpose and, crucially, what modes of address are available to the poet. The nature of an oral text – that is, what it sets out to do and be, and with what degree of capacity, reflexivity or impediment – depends on many factors beyond the impact of the researcher alone.
In the chapters which follow, I examine how Manisi tried to deploy the praise poem in a variety of contexts, all of them in different ways deeply inhospitable to free communication. I will try to show as comprehensively as possible that, despite many and constant obstacles, he always sought to communicate with his audiences rather than merely to exhibit his literary form or demonstrate his skill at improvisation. As well as focusing on the terms of address used by the poet to craft his appeals to his audiences, I will also look closely at the ways in which Manisi and Opland described and understood the project they undertook together and the texts that their long association produced and archived. I hope that my study suggests the enormous value of the productive and sustained collaboration between a talented poet and a committed scholar at the same time that it takes a critical, but not a judgemental, approach to some of the ways in which that collaboration has framed and fixed Manisi’s body of poetry. Opland tries to be aware of the pitfalls of writing about and interpreting the literary output and life of a man with whom he had so long and so close an association but who was at the same time a primary subject of his academic work. In his memoir of his relationship with Manisi, he suggests how acutely he recognises the many constraints placed upon his association with Manisi by the pair’s instantiation of the racial and economic inequities sustained by apartheid. There is much to be written into South Africa’s literary history – about how certain spheres of cultural production happened and what kinds of texts and bodies of texts such processes made – through the study of similar collaborative enterprises.
Perhaps the most sustained critique I make in this book pertains to the categories that Opland and Manisi applied to Manisi’s izibongo: they do not adequately illuminate the poems’ different textualities, nor do they account for the pressures on those texts of their broad socio-political contexts of production. Based on the kinds of explanations and cautions provided by Goldstein and others, Opland and Manisi distinguished between ‘performances’ and ‘demonstrations’ of oral poetry. ‘Performance’ in this scheme denotes poems produced spontaneously at local, traditional events where audiences understood the language and conventions of the poem. The concept implies poetic efficacy and ‘naturalness’ of purpose. In the category of ‘demonstration’ fall all the poems produced as part of teaching seminars, as well as those generated for fieldwork purposes at Opland’s request. The term ‘demonstration’ suggests a kind of simulacrum: the form is exhibited through texts that are not themselves efficacious or possessed of individuality. The distinction conditioned audience response to Manisi and fails to account for the poet’s political agenda in addressing his listeners. In addition, the categories label performances in misleading ways: for example, Manisi’s poems at Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations are considered to be ‘performances’ because they unfold in ‘natural’ contexts and are thus ‘efficacious’. In fact, the ‘independence’ poems are deeply compromised texts that bear the hallmarks of the inhospitable politics in which they operated.
On the question of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ contexts, this study tries to attend carefully to that which hampered Manisi’s efforts to communicate with his audiences: political complexities, circumstances of censorship, and the difficulties in excavating terms and ideas from beneath their apartheid veneer. Manisi consciously tries to educate his listeners about the role he feels he must play as imbongi: a liar who tells lies truer than the truth. His frequent suggestions of the difficulty of speaking truth constitute the poet’s way of problematising his poetic form’s very conventions. In examining notions of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ contexts, I hope to get nearer to an understanding of Manisi’s particular use of his traditional form in circumstances of extraordinary political and social complexity – the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ were in short supply in apartheid South Africa. It is important to try to avoid easy binaries between homogeneous, rural, traditional communities of consensus and mutual understanding in which texts operate uniformly, and complex urban audiences for whom popular forms must constantly shift and renegotiate themselves in struggle with their conditions of production.
I rely on translated and transcribed texts, the majority of which are quoted from Opland’s (2005) The Dassie and the Hunter (which contains the most up-to-date translations of poems) and a few of which are drawn from the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, which I had the good fortune to consult intensively in early 2002. Manisi regarded himself as a guardian of his language, which he knew intimately and loved with a palpable reverence. Opland testifies to the extraordinary depth of Manisi’s knowledge of the isiXhosa language by admitting that several of the expressions and words used by the poet were nowhere to be found in translation or official isiXhosa dictionaries. The translations of Manisi’s poems represent collaborations between poet and researcher: it was usual practice for Manisi and Opland to produce translations together in discussion, and Opland welcomed Manisi’s corrections, suggestions and interpretive elaborations. Although the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature includes several audio and visual tapes of Manisi’s performances, for instance in the United States, I do not comment on these as part of my interpretive endeavour, largely because they conveyed so overridingly as to obviate much critical description, the sterility of the uncomprehending classroom environments in which they were made. I was struck in watching them by two things: first, the energy Manisi injected into his declamations despite his isolation, and second, how easy it must have felt for English-bound audiences, confronted by a wall of incomprehensible sound and by the taciturn glower of the man making noise, to take the poems merely as instances of a genre, as having nothing intimately to do with them. Something of the poems’ understanding of their own urgency and mandate – encoded in the ways in which the texts converse with the conventions of their genre – reached me only when I was able to read them in translation. The limitations of my access to the poetry Manisi performed are severe indeed; for some readers, they will militate entirely against any value in my project.
As the rise in popularity and importance of translation studies suggests, the postcolonial world is one in which, if we are not exactly at ease with the contingency of our understanding of and access to difference, we are at least bound to accept these limitations and to make them meaningful as part of our intellectual and cultural transactions by working creatively and respectfully with the nodes of access available to us. Much work in the field of oral studies proceeds from an authority rooted in intimacy with the language in which subject-texts are produced – this is a formidable authority, which produces knowledge and insights of a particular kind. It is the indispensable tool of the kind of anthropology, ethnography and literary study conducted by leading scholars in orality like Graham Furniss, Opland, Gunner and Barber. These researchers are able to gather material, translate it, and then write about it in a secondary manner. In doing this kind of work, they not only describe and interpret the materials with which they emerge from the field, but they also actively participate in the creation of a body of texts that we call ‘African literature’. Oral literature occupies in the schema of this whole a primary place conceptually – anyone who teaches the subject will wish to impress upon students the richness and duration of oral production on the continent, as well as its complementarity with and diffusion into the practices of a number of Africa’s written products. And yet, can we begin to acknowledge a thing called ‘African literature’ if we cannot recognise that particular, transcribed oral texts are acts of literature in their own right, deserving of multiple attentions, and are not merely instances of genres or of the rule that oral literature flourishes here? It may be time to acknowledge of scholarly enquiry into African literature, which has surely reached maturity, that there are those equipped to make texts available to new audiences, those trained to assess such acts and their textual eventualities, and those who wish to read the residues of both of these preoccupations with a view to quite different questions and interests. In order to read David Manisi’s poetry with my own intellectual concerns in mind as well as my own limitations, I must rely on those in my field who have very different interests and skills from my own.
Duncan Brown’s discussion of translation, in his seminal book Voicing the Text (1998), acknowledges the many limitations that attend reliance on translated texts but argues persuasively that this reliance can encourage a more detailed accounting for and analysis of the processes of mediation specific texts have undergone. My own preoccupations, for example, concern the political contexts that mediated Manisi’s texts in their performance, as well as the categories of efficacy and naturalness applied to them. In approaching Manisi’s poetry as one of the potential future readers for whom he hoped in creating texts for the record, I work from Brown’s assumption: that despite the ‘conceptual and ideological difficulties’ translated texts raise, they remain ‘ “useful” in making available the political visions, aesthetic understandings, spiritual insights, symbolic identifications, economic imperatives, social pressures, and quotidian lived experiences of South African people in history’ (1998: 14). More than that, however, I have tried to suggest that the translated texts themselves have entered the record of African literary history and ought to be used in the new ways made possible by such a passage.
There are two parts to this book. In the first, I write about Manisi’s publishing career as well as his performances at Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations. These texts all apparently fall within the category of the ‘natural’ since they were produced in isiXhosa for Xhosa audiences, with whom the poet intended to communicate according to shared literary and cultural conventions. But the texts reveal their struggle with their socially and politically fraught world, and Part One problematises the idea that the Xhosa imbongi had access during apartheid to ‘natural’ contexts of textual production. Part Two looks at those of Manisi’s poems that were produced for Opland’s fieldwork and for university and school audiences, and that have been labelled ‘demonstrations’. The argument of Part Two is twofold: first, that despite his frequent lack of success, Manisi tried to deploy the conventions of his form in alien and sometimes hostile environments so that an understanding of his university poetry as mere ‘demonstration’ undermines the poet’s attempts to address his audiences. And second, that these efforts at efficacy in alienating environments also strained the texts in various and sometimes surprisingly generative ways. What I hope this study shows, more than anything else, is that an archive of literary endeavour such as Manisi’s bears the scars and complicities of its time and reveals the vacuums made by all its absent, ungathered texts, but that it also reflects on itself – its capacities and distortions – in fascinating, plentiful and instructive ways that give it a new provenance in the literary history.
