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INTRODUCTION

“Before 1870,” observes Luli Callinicos, “most Africans in southern Africa lived in independent chiefdoms. These existed alongside some small Trekker or Boer Republics and the British colonies of the Cape and Natal. Less than fifty years later, an industrial revolution had swept up all these little states and chiefdoms into one large state dominated by white capitalists” (1987: 11). Nontsizi Mgqwetho was caught up in that revolution: she lived on the Witwatersrand goldfields, but looked back to her rural background in the Cape, and to earlier, happier times when the independent Xhosa chiefdoms were free of white domination. For nearly a decade, from 1920 to 1929, she contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu, the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa. Apart from what is revealed in these writings, however, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman’s poetry on 23 October 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from. Nothing more is heard from her, but the poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. She finds her strength in her own conception of the Christian God, and in Mother Africa, Nursemaid slain by her sucklings, who, she insists, has no need to respond to appeals for her return since she has never left, steadfastly standing by her disappointing people.

In a lament published on 2 December 1922 (poem 7), Nontsizi gives her mother’s name as Emmah Jane Mgqwetto, the daughter of Zingelwa of the Cwerha clan, and associates her with the Hewu district near Queenstown. Nontsizi herself would have taken her father’s clan, Chizama. In the poem she urges members of the two bereaved clans to weep at the death of her mother:

Kuyadlul’ ingqondo zetu,

Ukushiywa ngulo mzali;

Emacwereni—nakwa—Chizama,

Bampompoza ezir’ar’a.

This parent’s departure

leaves us stunned;

among Cwerha and Chizama

bitter tears are shed. (7: 86-9)

Nontsizi signed her first poem in Umteteli with her clan name, Chizama, and her next two poems credit her as author in terms of her clan. Earlier, in 1897, two prose contributions written by Cizama were published in the King William’s Town newspaper Imvo zabantsundu (the variant spelling in the clan name is insignificant: the letter h merely indicates aspiration), both submitted from Tamara in the eastern Cape. The first, critical of ministers for encouraging sectarian divisions in the community, appealed for unity: ... manyanani mabandla nabafundisi benu, manyanani zititshala, manyanani mzi ontsundu; mapele amakwele, nomona, woluleni pambili umqokozo, ihambe inqwelo yokukanya, congregations and your ministers, unite; teachers, unite; black people, unite. End all jealousies and envy. Strain at the chain and get the wagon of light moving (Imvo, 20 May 1897: 3). The second criticised a recent bible revision for its flat style; the style, Cizama concluded, should have been more sensitive to the content, as the lyrics of a song are to the music: Ukufaka amazwi angaqelekileyo kwinteto enjenge Sibhalo, kunjengokutya ukutya okumnandi ze kugalelwe intanga ezirwada zomxoxozi, ungade uhlute ungeka qondi ukuba usesitubeni sokuhluta, To include unfamiliar words in a text like the Scriptures is like eating tasty food mixed with raw melon seeds: you feel full without quite understanding why (Imvo, 14 October 1897: 2). Jealousy and the need for unity are major themes of Nontsizi’s poetry; also characteristic of her poetry is the second extract’s unexpected shift to a homely domestic image (at least suggesting that this member of the Chizama clan might have been female). Of course, there are many members of the Chizama clan who could have written these two letters but, apart from Nontsizi’s poems in Umteteli, they are the only two contributions to newspapers that I have encountered signed Chizama, and the style and content of the letters are strongly suggestive of Nontsizi. If she is the author of the two letters to the editor of Imvo, then in 1897 she was living in Tamara, which lies to the north of the road between King William’s Town and Peddie. Some support for this suggestion can be derived from a poem that appeared in Umteteli on 18 December 1920, in which Nontsizi criticised the editor of the newspaper Abantu-Batho for bragging that he had brought her from Peddie to Johannesburg (4: 63-66).

Nontsizi’s mother, then, lived for the last years of her life in Whittlesea (Hewu) south of Queenstown, and Nontsizi herself may have lived in Tamara near Peddie. In terms of royal allegiance, she was a Rharhabe (a Ngqika, or a Xhosa person). Nontsizi refers to herself as a daughter of the Xhosa king Sandile (13: 61), she often mentions Sandile in her poetry, and in her first poem she quotes from Sandile’s praise poem:

...kuba singabantwa

na bo Gaga u Gago luhamba lu

Gongqoza lukwezi Xesi u Ndanda

Ko Vece u Xesi Magqagala

Umtunzi wa bantu bonke bengaka

Nje nditsho ku Sandile mna.

we’re loyal to the royal prince

“who rumbles down Xesi’s banks,

flits over Vece, the rock-strewn Xesi,

shade for all, however many.”

I’m citing Sandile’s praises. (1: 11-15)

Sandile, the son and heir of the Rharhabe king Ngqika, was shot and killed in the last frontier war in 1879, so Nontsizi herself may have been born before that date, but not necessarily so. Sandile’s son and heir, Gonya (also known as Edmund), who had participated in the war, was captured, tried and imprisoned in Cape Town, released in 1888 and died in 1910. He had been educated at Zonnebloem College in Cape Town, an Anglican school for the children of chiefs, and had accordingly not undergone traditional circumcision, so he was never officially acknowledged as a chief, though his followers accepted him as their leader (see Hodgson 1987: 183). Nontsizi never mentions Gonya by name, though she often laments the loss of powerful kings and the decline of royalty. Tamara was the great place (or royal residence) of the Mdushane chiefs, so if she was living there in 1897, she would have been close to a Xhosa royal court though, as a woman, excluded from its affairs.

The Xhosa people, amaXhosa, took the names of their chiefs, just as the subjects of Queen Victoria were known as the Victorians, of Edward, Edwardians. Xhosa himself, a hazy historical figure, was one of the early ancestors of Phalo (d. 1775), the father of both Gcaleka (d. 1778) and Rharhabe (d. 1782); Rharhabe was the grandfather of Ngqika (1778-1829). The Xhosa people (amaXhosa) acknowledged the authority of members of the royal dynasty until the reign of Phalo; after Phalo’s sons Rharhabe and Gcaleka quarreled the nation split, whereafter Rharhabe’s followers were known as amaRharhabe, the Rharhabe people, and Gcaleka’s as the amaGcaleka; after Ngqika split from his uncle Ndlambe (another son of Rharhabe, who had acted as regent in Ngqika’s minority), his followers were known as amaNgqika, the Ngqika, and his uncle’s were the amaNdlambe. They were all—the Ngqika, the Ndlambe, the Rharhabe or the Gcaleka—still the Xhosa people, they lived in what they called the land of Xhosa, or the land of Phalo (umhlaba kaPhalo), and they all spoke the language that came to be known as Xhosa, isiXhosa. A number of other independent kingdoms stretching to the north and east of Xhosa territory up the eastern seaboard of southern Africa (Thembu, Mpondomise, Xesibe, Bomvana, Bhaca, Mpondo) spoke local varieties of the same language, but the missionaries who first transcribed isiXhosa had settled in Ngqika’s territory, and that form of the language became the printed standard. Xhosa is the language of all the Xhosa-speaking peoples (also referred to as the Cape Nguni), only the southwesternmost group of which are the Xhosa.

All the Xhosa-speaking peoples acknowledged the authority of a chief, inkosi, and a king, ikumkani, paramount to the chiefs, who were members of a royal clan. Chiefs and kings lived at a great place, ikomkhulu, and ruled with the advice of councillors, amaphakathi. The chief allocated land and presided over court cases, but there were checks on royal authority: inkosi yinkosi ngabantu, a chief is a chief by virtue of people. If subjects were unhappy with a regime, they were free to leave and seek land in another chiefdom. Another restraint on royal power was exercised by praise poets, iimbongi, associated with royal courts, poets with the licence to criticise the chief with impunity in their poetic declamations, izibongo, which served to moderate any excessive behaviour in upholding the social norm on behalf of the people. The izibongo of Ngqika, for example, portrays him as a collaborator with whites, criticises him for the loss of territory to encroaching white settlers and for blaming the advice of his councillors, and offers a scathing concluding comment on his scandalous abduction of Thuthula, one of the wives of his uncle Ndlambe (and thus in custom committing incest), that led to an internecine battle between the Ngqika and the Ndlambe at Amalinde in 1818:

He’s Scandalmonger, mocking men behind their backs,

he traffics with scavengers,

he’s an imp who consorts with strangers,

a black snake that cleaves the pool.

He’s a foul-winged vulture,

a kite resting in swamp waters,

a rogue monitor with one horn,

spurned by his kin and abandoned.

He enjoys snuffling in trivia,

he’s a thornless aloe that still pricks.

He’s a wild beast who devours his own home then denies it,

saying Myelenzi and Makhabalekile destroyed it.

He’s the bar who barred Phalo’s cattle:

whoever raised it would suffer the consequences.

He’s an irascible moaner,

when he tries to plough he’s chased off like the land isn’t his.

Resolute, his stench puts nations to flight.

Leave the hut of seclusion and distribute cattle!

Who would support you

when you’d fucked your own mother? (Opland 1992: 217-18)

The ceremonial poetry of the imbongi, who was always a male, was not the only form of izibongo current in the community: poems were created about cattle or animals, there were traditional poems about clans and lineages, and most people, male and female, assembled poems about themselves (see Opland 1983 and 1998). Even though Nontsizi might have been barred by her gender from functioning as an imbongi at the Mdushane great place in Tamara, she would almost surely have honed her poetic talent in the recitation of clan praises and in the composition and recitation of outspoken, hyperbolic poems about herself and her associates (similar to poem 13 below). The personal izibongo generally consisted of a praise name, a noun that characterised its subject, perhaps extended into a line, perhaps extended into a succession of lines. One of the royal ancestors of Nelson Mandela, for example, was known as Madiba, Filler, the son of Hala, and this name was extended into the line Madiba, owadib’ iindonga, Filler who filled gullies (so people could reach each other and reconcile). Ngqika is Scandalmonger, mocking men behind their backs, Nguso-Tshul’ ubembe, uhlek’ abaneligqo (Rubusana 245); he’s the bar who barred Phalo’s cattle: whoever raised it would suffer the consequences, Umvalo obuvalel’ inkomo zika-Phalo, / Owowuvula ngowozek’ ityala (Rubusana 246). Nontsizi is Uliramncwa akuvelwa ngasemva / Nabakwaziyo babeta besotuka (13: 11-12), wild beast too fierce to take from behind, / those who know tremble in tackling you, or Dadakazi lendada ze Afrika / Ub’hib’hinxa lwentombi esinqe sibi (13: 33-34), duck of the African thickets, / ungainly girl with ill-shaped frame. Such stylised praises, commemorating a quality or deed of the subject, could be listed in any order from one performance of a poem to another: izibongo lack the linear coherence favoured in western poetry, they provide one discrete detail after another, all contributing to the complex depiction of a person, rapidly and disconcertingly shifting in voice and point of view. The lines of Xhosa izibongo are tiles in a tessellated mosaic, rather than a western lyric’s ordered strand of beads. Nontsizi’s poetry exhibits these structural features of izibongo, while at the same time adopting western stanzaic structure and, later in the sequence, rhyme.

Although she writes poetry that draws on the style of traditional izibongo, and at times claims for herself the voice of an imbongi, although she is fond of rural imagery and often speaks as a red-blanketed traditionalist, Nontsizi’s poetry is distinctively urban, occasionally spiced with Zulu, English and Afrikaans words, recording earthquakes in Johannesburg, condemning blacks who ape white fashion and above all bemoaning the lax morals in the cities of the school-educated youth, living at a distance from the moderating authority of rural chiefs and customary tradition. Although she might have lived in Tamara near the royal residence of the Mdushane chiefs, the jurisdiction of Xhosa chiefs did not extend to Johannesburg. Unlike the poetry of the imbongi, her poetry does not praise chiefs or relish in arcane genealogical details: as she frequently comments, Amagama enkosi ayandipazamisa, the names of kings confuse me. Her rousing poetry does not appeal to a narrow ethnicity, as the imbongi’s izibongo does. Her poems deploy military imagery at times, but she does not dwell on the particulars of frontier history. She appeals broadly to all the black nations, urging them to settle their narrow ethnic and political differences and join in a common struggle for liberation.

The Xhosa, living on the eastern frontier of territory increasingly encroached on by white settlers, engaged in a series of open conflicts for nearly a century, the last of which was the war of Ngcayechibi, which started as a quarrel between Gcaleka and Mfengu drinkers at a beer-party and ended in 1879 after the death of the Xhosa king Sandile (Mfengu conscripts danced over Sandile’s mutilated body—see Milton 278-79—but Nontsizi opposes such expressions of ethnic rivalry and urges Xhosa and Mfengu to settle their historic differences so that blacks may unite in opposition to whites: see poem 66). The Xhosa-speaking peoples lost territory to white control throughout the nineteenth century, a process that culminated in the annexation of Pondoland in 1894. Nontsizi frequently laments this loss of territory but, although she talks generally of battlefields, she never traffics in the details of war and conflict, as the male imbongi often did; writing in the 1920s, she is more concerned with white control of black mobility and working conditions. Although she uses the knobkirrie (induku, a knobbed fighting stick) as an image (Into elwa ngezulu induku zihleli, clubs are at hand but I fight with lightning), hers are urban battles of pass protests and black mobilisation.

The Xhosa way of life was permanently disrupted by military conquest and white territorial encroachment; severe social disruption was also introduced by their conversion to Christianity. The earliest missionaries to the Cape Nguni settled in Xhosa territory. In 1799 Ngqika granted Dr J.T. van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society permission to work among his people. Van der Kemp studied the language, assembled an extensive vocabulary of Xhosa words, and began to teach his pupils to write, but he withdrew to minister to the Coloured community at Bethelsdorp after little over a year amongst the Xhosa people. He was succeeded in 1816 by Joseph Williams, who also took up residence with Ngqika’s permission, but who died after only two years in 1818. John Brownlee led the first permanent mission to Ngqika territory in 1820; his associate at Tyhume, John Bennie, completed the first systematic transcription of the Xhosa language, which was printed for the first time in December 1823. Christian missionaries of various (often competing) persuasions worked, for good or ill, at converting the Xhosa-speaking peoples, and introduced a radical social rift between those who converted to the new religion, the amakholwa or amagqobhoka, and those who continued in their traditional way of life and precolonial beliefs. The Xhosa favoured red ochre as a cosmetic, smearing it on their faces and bodies, and on the skins they wore as cloaks and skirts. Later, they smeared ochre on the blankets they took in trade with white settlers and adopted as garments. The Christian missionaries insisted that their converts lay aside these traditional practices and adopt European fashions of dress and patterns of behaviour. The lexicographer Albert Kropf, himself a missionary, reflected the European ethnocentric bias in his definition of iqaba (a derivative of the verb ukuqaba, to paint or smear the body with red clay) as “One who habitually paints himself with ochre; fig. an ignorant person, a heathen” (see further the comment on the title of poem 8 in the Notes below). Red-blanketed people continued to practise male circumcision, their marriageable children continued to dance the intlombe (condemned as licentious by missionaries and defined by Pahl as “a traditional weekend entertainment of young men and girls of their age group where the men dance to the accompaniment of the girls’ singing and clapping; this lasts all night”) and they continued to appeal to their ancestors, who were ever-present as shades or spirits. The Xhosa believed in Qamata, an ill-defined supreme being; the dead ancestors could be invoked in poetry and prayer and with beer to intercede with Qamata on behalf of the living.

To a large extent the Xhosa initially resisted missionary teaching, though this was not the case for the Mfengu, Zulu refugees who had settled among them (see the note to the title of poem 66). The power and authority of the chiefs was broken, however, and Xhosa incorporation into the white economy was facilitated, not only by war and conquest, not only by conversion to Christianity, but also by the disastrous millenarian cattle-killing episode of 1856-7 (see Peires 1989), enflamed by the visions of the teenage girl Nongqawuse, and by the discovery of diamonds in 1866 and gold in the following decade. Xhosa joined Mfengu in the schools, especially at the premier mission institution of Lovedale, founded in 1841, where they were given a Victorian education alongside the sons and daughters of missionaries. A new Principal of Lovedale revised the educational syllabus in 1870, withdrawing Greek and Hebrew and mathematics in favour of book-binding and wagon-making, but by then an African elite had already been established in the Cape. They contributed to the Lovedale newspaper Indaba and its successor Isigidimi sama Xosa, and, when Isigidimi failed in the face of competition from independent black newspapers, they contributed to the Mfengu-oriented Imvo zabantsundu in King William’s Town and its Xhosa-Thembu rival Izwi labantu in East London (see Opland 1998 chapter 11). The black vote was mobilised by these newspapers, and black political organisations were established, the Native Educational Association in 1879, Imbumba yamanyama in 1882, the South African Native Congress in 1898 and, most significantly, the South African Native National Congress in 1912 (see Odendaal). The quest for independence within the structures introduced by Europeans found expression too in the formation towards the end of the 19th century of breakaway African independent churches (see the note to 49: 15), which came to be known collectively as the Ethiopian churches.

The discovery of mineral wealth contributed to inevitable conflict between the Boer republics, on whose land the minefields lay, and the British colonial government, which ruled the Cape province and Natal. After the war, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, peace was followed by the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 with a constitution that placated Boer sentiment and largely ignored African representations. Gold had been discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, and the city that became Johannesburg rapidly mushroomed. The inland mining industry that developed was fed by black migrant labour, recruited from the rural areas. The gold mines tended to attract African males as migrants; there were relatively few African women on the Rand initially: “only 14 per cent of Africans—and less than seven per cent of African women (approximately 147,000)—were living in the urban areas by 1921. African women, by far the largest racial group among women, were thus the least urbanised of any sex-race category” (Walker 11). The numbers of African women had doubled in the years immediately after the First World War: in 1918 there were only 67, 111 African women on the Rand. Nontsizi Mgqwetho may have moved from the eastern Cape to the Rand in this period. Certainly she was involved in an anti-pass protest at the Johannesburg Fort on 3 April 1919, as her contribution to Umteteli on 13 December 1924 testifies (item 54), and may have been arrested at some time (Sasakuva sesibanjwa ngamadindala, Next thing we knew the cops had the cuffs on us, 12: 14). Why she came to Johannesburg is not clear. Bonner, citing Gaitskell, notes that in this period “two broad categories of women came to be settled in the towns: firstly, those coming unattached or fleeing from their homes, who became domestic servants, washerwomen or prostitutes, or took up illicit liquor selling to earn an income; secondly, the wives and daughters of families of those who came to settle permanently in town” (278). From her poetry it is abundantly evident that she was an independent-minded woman. She describes herself as ungainly and physically unattractive, and suggests she is unmarried:

Taru! Dadakazi lendada ze Afrika

Ub’hib’hinxa lwentombi esinqe sibi

Awu! Nontsizi bulembu e Afrika

Akusoze wende nezinto zigoso.

Mercy, duck of the African thickets,

ungainly girl with ill-shaped frame.

Oh Nontsizi, African moss,

with bow-legs like yours you’ll never marry! (13: 33-36)

Her first poem was submitted from Crown Mines to the southwest of the burgeoning urban complex; she might have been in domestic service in a white household on the mine, although early domestic servants tended to be black males or white females. She may have been uncomfortable in her situation: Awu ndakubeka ndibheka emlungwini, Oh I blundered in going to whites! (12: 16). Twice she writes poems after earthquakes hit Johannesburg, on 1 December 1923 and 6 December 1924 (poems 9 and 52), which suggests that she stayed on in Johannesburg for at least a few years.

An invaluable nugget of biographical information can be gleaned from Nontsizi’s only English article, located by Ntongela Masilela. On 15 December 1923 Umteteli carried a revisionist account of the murder of the Voortrekker Piet Retief and his party by the Zulu king Dingana (“one of the bravest Kings who ever sat on the Native throne”) on 16 December 1838. The article was written by Elizabeth Mgqwetto, who is described as “The well-known and talented Poetess.” In another item located by Masilela, R.V. Selope Thema referred to the anti-pass protest organised by Congress in April 1919, noting the involvement of “Miss Nontsizi Mgqwetho and Miss Mary Mgqwetho” (The Bantu World, 22 October 1949 cited in the notes to poem 54). Two brief items of social news mention Mary Mgqwetho: on 2 June 1934 the Johannesburg newspaper The Bantu World reported in its Social and Personal News column:

Miss Mary Mgqweto a well-known lady in the dancing circles will promote a flannel dance in the Inchcape Hall to the music of the Merry Black Birds on June 8. Admission 2/6. Invitation extended to all.

Nontsizi depicts herself dancing (13: 21-24, for example), and dancing is a very common image in her poetry. Mary Mgqweto also helped to organise a party in 1941 for someone traveling to Queenstown (we know that Nontsizi’s mother lived near Queenstown):

A successful farewell party was given at Khanyile Street, W.N. Townshipin honour of Mr J.D. Ngojo who is shortly leaving for Queenstown.The organisers were Mrs. Gladys Mbahlana and Miss MaryMgqweto. (The Bantu World, 13 December 1941, page 15).

These two items associating Mary Mgqwetho with dancing recall a stanza Nontsizi wrote in praise of herself:

Awu! Taru! Nontsizi bulembu e Afrika

Ntokazi etsho ngentlombe ezimnandi

Zitsho zidume nendonga ze Afrika

Arha-hai abhitye onke amadodana.

Oh mercy, Nontsizi, African moss,

woman, Africa’s walls are throbbing

with the sound of your lively parties:

Ach shame! All the young men wither. (13: 65-68)

We may conclude that Nontsizi’s English name was Elizabeth Mgqwetho; Nontsizi (“Mother of Sorrows”) may have been her given Xhosa name, a nickname, or a name she adopted when she started writing poetry. Mary Mgqwetho might well have been her sister. Mary lived on the Rand into the 1940s, where she was associated with social dances; both Mary and Elizabeth were politically active from at least 1919, and both remained unmarried. Nontsizi may have been in domestic service on the mines; certainly she was neither prostitute nor shebeen queen.

In Johannesburg, as her poetry makes abundantly clear, Nontsizi was a committed member of a women’s prayer union, a manyano. “By and large,” Deborah Gaitskell writes of the manyanos, “the African Christian women joined groups explicitly as mothers, and, particularly under the influence of mission supervisors, assumed a vital role in safeguarding female chastity, marital fidelity, and maternal and domestic responsibilities” (Gaitskell 1997: 255). The concerns of the manyano are very much the concerns especially of Nontsizi’s later poetry:

The style of the manyanos, common to all denominations, had roots also in late nineteenth-century revivalist preaching that sought to induce a kind of anguish over personal sin, with bewailing and confession, and a public commitment to a fresh start. . . . Wailing became particularly entrenched in women’s groups, perhaps because weeping was seen as more culturally appropriate for women, especially at Nguni funerals. Isililo (“wailing”, the term the American Board women chose for their movement) . . . refers to the protracted ritual keening of women after a burial. (Gaitskell 1997: 262)

Nontsizi may well have been associated with the American Board manyanos: Izililo becomes a recurrent cry in her later poetry (see the note to poem 37). In her manyano, she would almost surely have practised preaching: the headnotes to her later poems, and especially her prose contribution on preaching (item 95) are strongly reminiscent of a preaching style, peppered with liberal references to scripture. “In the weekly manyano meetings,” writes Gaitskell,

women would give short expositions of the meaning and personal application of particular biblical texts; at annual conferences and evangelistic services, they would preach to and exhort much larger groups of both Christians and ‘heathens’. There is plenty of evidence that women were keen to preach (Gaitskell 1995: 223).

Despite this hunger for preaching, only rarely did African women’s zeal for oral expression of their faith lead to leadership positions in mixed public gatherings. Perhaps they were resigned to the limitations missionaries placed on their leadership and preaching role, and the opposition they might face from jealous black male clergy. Manyanos provided a segregated, “safer” sphere of female religious oratory. (Gaitskell 1997: 263)

So, “zeal for preaching might be kindled within the manyano, and any further oratorical abilities developed as a result were compulsorily redirected back into female channels” (Gaitskell 1995: 227). However, Nontsizi was able to break free of these restrictions, and found public expression of her passion for preaching through Umteteli’s pages: she often starts her poems with an expression of gratitude to the Editor for providing space to poets.

Nontsizi makes liberal use of the bible in her poetry, taking her titles from Scripture and referring her readers to passages in the bible. She quotes the Old Testament more than the New; clearly, she is attracted to the prophets, Daniel, Amos, Samuel, Isaiah and Nehemiah. Despite her dependence on and familiarity with the bible, however, she often denounces it. The bible was an agent of dispossession

Zay’ konxa! Afrika ngamakamandela

Nange Bhaibhile, mipu, zayikahlela

They clapped shackles on you, Africa,

hurled you down with bible and musket (37: 14-15)

and disruption

Wavela umlungu kungeko zimanga

Weza nge Bhaibhile ngoko sati manga

When the white appeared, all was normal:

abnormality came with his bible (60: 39-40);

the bible’s message is deceptive:

Apo zikon’ inkosi zase mlungwini

Ezi ne bhaibhile ezingo mb’axa-mbini

in that world of white lords and masters

the bible speaks with forked tongue (43: 23-24);

and vicious:

Lovangeli yabo yokusikohlisa

Mina ingangam ndigaqe ngedolo.

Lingasiposa ne Zulu siyimamela

Kub’ inomkonto obuye usihlabe

Iyahanahanisa kumntu Ontsundu

Iwugqwetile ke lomhlaba ka Palo.

This gospel of theirs, designed to deceive us,

stands as tall as I do down on my knees.

Heed its word and heaven’s lost:

it’s a spear that wheels to stab us.

The hypocritical cant of the white man’s gospel

turns Phalo’s land on its head. (30: 43-48)

But there is no contradiction here. She tacks onto the end of her eighth poem the qualification

Anditsho ukuti Izwi lika Tixo

Ukuteta kwalo akunanyiso.

But I’m not saying the word of God

is entirely barren of truth. (8: 39-40)

The bible remains the word of God, despite the misuse the whites put it to:

Kanti nene nene beza kutshutshisa

Nge bhaibhile zabo beza kunyelisa

The simple truth is they came to oppress,

they came to blaspheme with their bibles. (48: 33-34)

It is the white man’s bible she rejects, not the word of God in the bible. Both black and white must recognise and not abuse the truth that resides in the bible. Blacks must accept the bible’s truth, not as the white man interprets it but as blacks discern it. As she comments scathingly in the prose introduction to poem 97, Akazange ukuxelelena u Ntsikana ukuba uze uqwalasele i Bhaibhile? Wazuka wena wayiyeka, wayiqwalaselelwa ngabelungu; andigxeki mlungu ke ngakuba nditsho: kodwa ke xa kutiwa: “Funa wawuya kufumana,” akutshiwo ke ukutiwa mawufunelwe ngomnye umntu, “Didn’t Ntsikana tell you to study the scriptures? And you left the whites to study them for you. I’m not mocking the white when I say that. But when it’s written ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ it doesn’t mean that someone else must do the finding for you.” Nor does acceptance of this truth necessarily entail a rejection of the truth inherent in traditional Xhosa custom:

Inyaniso masipatwe ngananinye

Inyaniso kungaviwa bantu banye

Nantso ke! Inyaniso yezi Bhalo

Napantsi ke, kweyetu imibhalo.

The truth must be treated fairly,

the truth must be heard by both sides:

the truth is there in the scriptures

and also within our blankets. (40: 21-24)

Gaitskell alludes to a process characteristic of the manyanos: “the moulding and significant transformation and appropriation of Christianity as it was embodied in southern African communities” (1995: 226). Nontsizi bears considerable reverence not only for biblical texts but also for the sayings of the revered Xhosa prophet Ntsikana, transmitted through oral tradition (see poem 43, for example). She draws into her poetry scriptural references and quotations as well as the words and prophetic sayings of Ntsikana: the unity of a tightly compacted ball of scrapings (imbumba yamanyama), for example, gathering together diverse sheep into one flock (Ulohlanganis’ imihlamb’ eyalanayo), Jesus as a hunting party hunting souls (Ulonq’ina izingela imipefumlo) or the flash of a portentous shooting star (Yabinza nenkwenkwezi isixelela). She consistently Africanises—and feminises—both Jehovah and Jesus.

If Nontsizi came to Johannesburg at the end of the First World War, she would have arrived in a time of considerable social unrest. The influenza epidemic of 1918 had hit urban blacks living in squalid conditions particularly hard, unions and pressure groups were mobilising and there was a series of strikes and anti-pass protests. In the wake of one of these strikes, the Chamber of Mines decided to launch a multilingual newspaper to counter the influence of Abantu-Batho. Brian Willan sketches the context. The idea for a new weekly newspaper published by the South African Chamber of Mines, he writes,

actually originated in 1919 with a request from a group of conservative African political leaders in the Transvaal—Saul Msane and Isaiah Bud-M’belle amongst them—for support from the Chamber of Mines for a newspaper which would provide an alternative voice to Abantu-Batho, the Congress newspaper which was controlled by the radical Transvaal branch of the movement. Their original approach was not successful, however, and the Chamber turned down their requests for support. But in the early months of 1920, following a massive black miners’ strike that February, the Chamber of Mines—more specifically, its Native Recruiting Corporation—decided to take the initiative in launching a newspaper with the objective, as they put it, of dispelling ‘certain erroneous ideas cherished by many natives and sedulously fostered by European and Native agitators, and by certain Native newspapers’. (Willan 251)

Willan also describes the political philosophy of the weekly paper which, he says, “throughout the 1920s appeared without a break (in contrast to Abantu-Bathowhich struggled desperately to keep afloat)”:

Whilst Umteteli was regarded by some Africans, and certainly by the South African Communist Party, as simply a tool of the mining industry, the line it took was a relatively liberal one. Its editorials advised against support for strike action as a means of redressing grievances, and precious little criticism of the mining industry ever appeared in its columns, but it did support the retention of the Cape franchise and its extension to the northern provinces; it opposed the Hertzog bills, and it was strongly against the colour bar in industry, and hence opposed the Mines and Works Amendment bill. For Umteteli the villains of the South African political stage were not, as the South African Communist Party would have it, the mining capitalists, but overpaid white workers who possessed the political means to force the government to concede their demands for a guaranteed place, protected by the colour bar, in industry; Afrikaner nationalists who demanded state handouts to subsidise inefficient farmers at the expense of the mining industry; and a Pact government that represented a cynical alliance of the two. (Willan 315-16)

All of Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s poetry appeared in the pages of Umteteli wa Bantu, The people’s messenger.

Her poetry is filled with images of sound: the wailing of women and Africa, the roar of thunder and rivers. Animals feature prominently too, the sheltering wing of a mother hen, the spots on a leopard, the stalking lion, the cow yielding only dribbles of milk and the hyenas that Christians turn into at night. Although she writes removed from her home country, her imagery is that of the countryside, rural rather than urban. Although she occasionally appropriates a masculine voice, her imagery is also very much that of a woman: she swears by Lady and refers to women’s petticoats and skirts and drums. Africa is clearly female, and Jesus wears a woman’s headdress. Her poetry is nearly a century old now, but it still impresses as refreshingly—and sadly—modern. However, readers might be puzzled by her repetitions: it is not just that phrases and even stanzas become formulaic, towards the end of the sequence the individual lines of entire poems can be matched elsewhere in her body of poetry. Is she guilty of creative laziness or fatigue? How much value can a poem have if it is a mere pastiche of phrases often used by the poet? The reader working through the sequence from beginning to end will surely be puzzled, alienated by what appears to be a lapse in originality, and might question the wisdom of an editor who includes poems that say nothing new in words that have become all too familiar. And this might be especially so when one of the translation principles is to translate repeated phrases and stanzas in exactly the same way.

My first response to such a charge would be that Nontsizi’s original audience would not have encountered these poems as a reader of this book will: at their most frequent, they appeared weekly, in an ephemeral medium designed to be discarded. Nine years separates the first poem from the last in the sequence, over which course of time even the most loyal fans of her poetry might not be troubled by the repetitions. Nontsizi might have kept copies of her published poems, which she ransacked from time to time; but these repeated words and phrases could also have stuck in her memory, and come to mind as appropriate as she wrote. Her readers would have been attuned to the izibongo of the imbongi, in which such repetition is commonplace. The imbongi has at his disposal a battery of formulas, words and phrases he has used of his chief, or words and phrases that he has heard other poets using of their chiefs, expressions of his own composition as well as expressions common to the tradition. As the imbongi S.M. Burns-Ncamashe said to me on 9 July 1971, when I asked him about the poet’s retention of memorised lines,

Well, in some cases they would repeat more or less the same phrases, but with new phrases each time, because usually izibongo do include a description of the appearance of a person or a thing, and naturally, since the appearance doesn’t change, you’d always refer to a man with that long nose or thin legs and so forth—he’d still have them, you know, a big tummy and so forth. So, in addition to the appearance, then there would be the events that may have taken place which would be included naturally in the subject of the izibongo. (Opland 1998: 49)

Members of a rural imbongi’s regular audience would not be troubled by such repetitions, they would actually welcome them, with the pleasurable recognition of the familiar.

All of Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s Xhosa contributions to Umteteli are included here, even when an item such as poem 98 is mainly a pastiche of earlier phrases and stanzas, or when poem 99 is wholly made up of repeated expressions. On the one hand, her prose preambles to the poems become more and more developed towards the end of the series, and they merit inclusion. Then again, the reader should learn to accept and absorb the repeated phrases, and use them, as an informed audience of a sequence of oral performances would. Formulaic passages are often highly suggestive, they communicate not only by denotation but also by connotation. This suggestive quality is present, informing the words, even when only part of a formulaic passage is cited. Formulaic repetition aids interpretation and can guide translation. For example, there is a stanza that recurs eight times after its first appearance in poem 37:

Hai: Ukuhlala kwawo wodwa Umzi

Nokungenwa kwamasango alomzi

Obantu babenikwe Intsikelelo

Namhla simanga ngumzi wembandezelo.

An early draft of my translation read

Oh the pity of an empty home

whose people once were blessed,

its easy entry wondrously

become today a place of want.

But it is clearly related to an earlier stanza in poem 19, which refers specifically to enemies who seem to be the agents of the home’s misfortune:

Hai! Ukuhlala kwawo wodwa Umzi

Obantu babenikwe Intsikelelo

Amasango etu onke akanamntu

Nabandezeli basuke bayintloko.

This was originally translated as

How sad a deserted home is!

Its people once were blessed,

its gates now stand unattended,

and its enemies reign supreme.

The repetitions common to the two stanzas, and the suggestion of the last line in the earlier stanza, led to a translation that turned the “wonder” into an “omen” (both sanctioned by Kropf), and made the oppression more specifically the forced removals suffered by black people under white control in South Africa. The repeated stanza has now become

Oh the homestead standing alone

with easy access through its gates,

whose people once had plenty,

now a sign of oppression.

It is because of this inherent suggestion of territorial dispossession causing the dereliction of black homesteads (with the implied threat of a continuation of the policy in the future) that Nontsizi tends to opens her poems with this lament, setting a tone for her political poetry, contrasting the settled, precolonial hospitality of the Xhosa home with the present disruption. The suggestion is there, even when there is no reference to enemies of the abandoned homestead.

The poems in sequence thus invite the reader of this book to forego western predispositions and to receive them as an audience would receive the poetic performances of a royal imbongi, to derive reassuring recognition in the repetitions and their kaleidoscopic rearrangements, to cultivate sensitivity to emotional suggestions that hover about the words, the economy that invests partial repetitions and ellipses. To read these poems in sequence in a book is to accept an invitation to adopt some of the analytical assumptions of the village audience of a rural imbongi in the land of Phalo, to enter the world of this tradition of African poetry free of western assumptions. The translations strive for rhythm and accuracy, and usually follow the structure of the original Xhosa texts. Only one major problem remains unresolved, and that concerns the form of some of the items, which are printed as prose. This may be because the poet submitted them as prose, or because the editor printed them in this form in order to conserve space. (Of the two options, the former seems to recommend itself since the prosody of item 6 is insecure, suggesting that it might have been the editor who set it in poetic form.) What is pronounced in these “prose” pieces is that they include passages found elsewhere in the poetry, and they are unusually punctuated, with capitals, colons and semicolons that might serve as markers, or guides to line division (see the note to item 36). No attempt has been made in the translation to set these passages in poetic form, just as no attempt has been made to reflect the rhyme that is adopted as from August 1924. However, every effort has been made to preserve the poet’s metaphoric references, and not to flatten them through glossing. This may leave the reader a bit puzzled, but reflects more closely the poet’s metaphoric world of rural female nurture and cultivation.

A conservative approach has been brought to reproducing the Xhosa texts, with editorial emendation kept to a minimum. As far as possible, the original readings are preserved. Alterations are introduced only in cases of clear typographical error; in that case, the original reading is given at the end of the text. No alterations are made on the grounds of orthography or word division, or dialect. This calls for some comment. John Bennie’s transcription of Xhosa, first printed in December 1823, remained influential for over a century. It was accepted by all missionary societies, who were responsible for editing or printing the earliest books and journals. A new orthography was introduced (ironically, by Bennie’s grandson) and adopted in 1936. It proved something of a disaster (see Opland 1998 chapter 13), considerably complicating and inhibiting literary production; its major innovations were reversed in 1955. The 1936 orthography was immediately unpopular and widely resented. A letter from Bennie attempting to justify his proposals drew an angry response from H.S. Ndlela:

It is now clear enough even for a weakling to see that the white man’s object is to make a Native so weak that he cannot stand by himself. The rock-bottom of the conspiracy has been brought to the fore-ground by the changes made in the existing orthography. We have been deprived of land, rights and even the dignity of our colour, and, to my discomfiture, we are now under the last cloud—the tragedy which finishes the whole game—the taking out of the core of our language. . . . The whole secret is that the Europeans want to make our languages simple for them to master, and thus deprive us of the privilege of being masters of our own language. (Umteteli 18 August 1934: 7)

Both revisions in the spelling system were accepted by education departments, who insisted that Xhosa books prescribed in schools (virtually the only market for Xhosa books) should be in the new orthographies. Books in outdated orthographies were removed from circulation, and publishers printed only books in the new orthographies; books submitted to publishers for consideration were often rejected for because they contained too many spelling mistakes. One consequence is that Xhosa books reflect a strictly regimented, heavily edited spelling system that has been accepted as standard, and the tendency even in scholarly articles is to quote Xhosa texts with their spelling homogenised for school consumption to meet the needs of Education Departments. Outside the skewed world of Xhosa books, no newspaper adopted the new orthography in 1936, and Nontsizi’s language from the 1920s is readily seen to be far freer of imposed rules and regulations. It is vital that this language be respected and preserved. Future readers and scholars might well find significance in her non-standard and sometimes inconsistent spelling where none might appear at the present time. In the light of this history, alterations to the Xhosa text are introduced sparingly, according text and author a respect they have not often enjoyed in the history of Xhosa literature. Missing or indistinct letters have been placed in square brackets, facilitating alternative reconstructions. Readers interested in seeing the texts as they originally appeared can find most of them online at http://pzadmin.pitzer.edu/masilela/newafrre/mgqwetto/poems/poems.htm.

In one important respect Nontsizi’s spelling has been overruled and altered. Most frequently, she spells her surname (and her mother’s surname) Mgqwetto. This anomalous spelling (double t is not standard in Xhosa) has been replaced by Mgqwetho throughout. The 1936 orthography played havoc with surnames, introducing an h to indicate aspiration. So, for example, the great Xhosa poet Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi signed himself as such for the first time in December 1934: before that time he used the spelling Samuel Edward Rune Mqayi. The last of Nontsizi’s poems was published in Umteteli in 1939, before the changes were proposed, but after the changes were introduced she would perhaps have adopted the form Mgqweto or Mgqwetho for her surname. Selope Thema spells her surname Mgqwetho in 1949, and this is likely to be the spelling of the surname of any relatives of Nontsizi living today, although the two reports in The Bantu World in 1934 and 1941 use the spelling Mgqweto. Although the spelling of Xhosa surnames remains inconsistent (we tend now to favour Mqhayi, but keep Rubusana), on balance it seemed advisable to regularise Nontsizi’s surname and bring it into line with current practice.

Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s contributions to Umteteli wa Bantu rank her among the most prolific of Xhosa poets, but the measure of her significance lies not in the quantity of her work. Although women feature fairly prominently as authors of Xhosa novels, no female has ever published Xhosa poetry of any stature, but while the circumstance of her gender is of vital interest from many perspectives, that too is an insufficient indicator of her significance, for it is by the quality of her poetry that she will come to be judged. To read her poems is to become immersed in the anger and frustration of a devout, witty woman, a sharp-tongued preacher inveighing against ministers, men, lax morals among Christians, black leaders, educated youngsters with a superior air, or the white man’s gospel, a swaying, prophetic visionary in a godless city calling for the ways to be straightened for the restitution of Africa, so that peace and order and a sense of humanity might return to the land of her fathers. Never one to slight her own powers, Nontsizi addresses herself in the opening to her twelfth poem:

Taru! Nontsizi dumezweni ngentsholo

Nto ezibongo ziyintlaninge yezwe

Mercy, Nontsizi, renowned for your chanting,

your poems are the nation’s bounty.

I trust this presentation of her incandescent poetry will restore that bounty to the nation.

THE XHOSA POETRY OF NONTSIZI MGQWETHO