Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
readership. ‘iRhodes’ is housed as an unpublished manuscript in the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature and substantial extracts of the long izibongo have been quoted in The Dassie. The poem provides a fascinating insight into the kinds of compromises Manisi tried to make to realise his vision of multicultural harmony for South Africa.
This chapter investigates the circumstances in and influences under which Manisi produced his written izibongo. The history of the poet’s publishing career is one of struggle and apparent failure: his newspaper contributions, although they showed every sign of attracting readers’ approval, were few; none of his books sold well or was widely read, and none is now in print. In Chapter 2, I discuss the peculiar adaptability of the izibongo form to print media, and argue that, as his chances of reaching immediate adult readerships diminished, Manisi began to value, above its circulatory function, the capacity of print to preserve texts so that his poems might address future readers in more congenial times. In this chapter, I discuss the political, intellectual and publishing context in which Manisi’s writing career grew increasingly marginalised, and investigate the reasons for his continuing to write tenaciously despite the obstacles that prevented him from finding a contemporary adult readership. I outline the historically interconnected factors that influenced Manisi as a writer and that shaped the world in which he wrote his early books and newspaper poetry: Christianity, literacy, mission education, black education debates, and the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Xhosa intellectual elites. The role of Christianity and the value of education were abiding concerns of Manisi’s written and performance poetry, in which references to missionaries and book learning often betray the poet’s deeply conflicted feelings about acculturation and the material legacies of the colonial encounter.
While the colonial occupation of Xhosa territory preoccupies much of Manisi’s poetry and attracts his angriest criticism, it was the constraints of his contemporary vernacular publishing industry and the increasingly polarised national politics of racial discrimination and resistance that pressured his career as a publishing and performing praise poet. Born into a world in which Xhosa writers like Tiyo Soga, WW Gqoba, IW Wauchope, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Mqhayi and many others had published considerable numbers of poems and been widely influential contributors to Xhosa newspapers, Manisi wished to add to the intellectual exchange in isiXhosa.2 However, the relative political and publishing freedoms enjoyed by the isiXhosa-speaking elite of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as its claim on adult reading publics and an engaged sphere of intellectual exchange, were rapidly receding when Manisi’s writing career commenced. His early publications appeared at a time of paradigmatic change when large numbers of apartheid laws that intensified and entrenched racial segregation were being passed. In the 1950s, apartheid’s ideology of divisive ethnicity infused black education policy, was reflected in measures that constrained the vernacular publishing industry, and caused the decline of African-language newspapers. Those of Manisi’s contemporaries, like JJR Jolobe, EG Sihele, FB Teka and St John Page Yako, who had made significant literary contributions to newspapers, ceased to publish in the popular press within the first decade of apartheid rule.3
In this and the next chapter, I shall argue that Manisi’s hopes in his written poetry of addressing broad political communities on a range of subjects pertinent to black experience were frustrated by a political context in which, first, newspapers no longer hosted vigorous Xhosa intellectual and literary exchange as they had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, second, publishers sought contributions solely for the publication of school textbooks, and third, resistance writers increasingly eschewed vernacular address in favour of publishing in urban contexts in the more widely accessible English medium, rejecting the rural polity as an anachronistic institution. In this chapter, I examine each of these areas (the Xhosa newspaper industry, book publishing and the rise of resistance literature) in turn, and outline the politics and perspectives of influential black writers who preceded and wrote contemporaneously with Manisi. I argue that the worldviews and literary opportunities that Manisi inherited were rapidly challenged by the apartheid context. Manisi’s intellectual and spiritual heritage and the polarised politics of his age informed his contradictory attitudes to the act of writing and the subject of education, which throughout his career he both criticised as a political imposition and championed as the means to black liberation. It is to these attitudes that I turn at the end of this chapter in an exploration of several of Manisi’s book and newspaper izibongo.
Early Xhosa intellectuals, debate and the newspaper
Michael Cross usefully divides black politics in South Africa into three broad periods: ‘(1) Christian-liberal reformism and moderation, 1884–1943; (2) pragmatic nationalism and Africanism, 1943–1976; and (3) critical nationalism and Africanism, 1976–1986’ (1992: 41). Although Manisi produced oral and written poetry between 1947 and 1988, a period that spans Cross’s second and third phases, Christian liberalism, which was perhaps the greatest legacy of his mission education, significantly influenced his early poetry. Indeed, this early liberalism was to remain a marked strain in (and, increasingly, on) his poetry throughout his career. In the apartheid context, Manisi’s efforts to tolerate and advance the multicultural national reality were constantly challenged by his strong commitment to Xhosa tradition and ritual, and by his underlying black nationalism. These allegiances, which he had inherited from early Xhosa intellectuals, were polarised by apartheid and the urban liberation struggle and are reflected as being in tension in Manisi’s written and oral poetry.
African leaders of Cross’s first phase were well-educated proto-nationalists who ‘made use of the mass media more extensively than the later nationalists’ (1992: 43). AC Jordan (1973), in his seminal account of Xhosa literature, charts the central importance to Xhosa intellectual and literary exchange of newspapers, a form which from the second half of the nineteenth century nurtured the most illustrious Xhosa writers, among them Tiyo Soga, WB Rubusana, JT Jabavu, and the greatest of them all, Mqhayi. Early mission-educated leaders, who were among the most prolific black writers, were strongly influenced by the liberal ideologies of their Christian educators. Many of the black intellectuals in the Cape Colony qualified for the franchise under the Cape liberal system. Access to the black franchise depended on age, gender, property and literacy, and infrequently empowered black voters to instal a person of colour into the Cape Legislative Assembly. Nevertheless, black intellectuals in the Cape felt that there was scope for their political advancement: many were engaged in politics, and many wrote essays for newspaper publication that contributed to public debates about political issues affecting black people. Opland’s (1983, 1998) comprehensive account of Xhosa literature in newspapers details the long history of the periodical as a mode of exchange among the educated black elite since the arrival of mission education and, with it, literacy in southern Africa.
These early intellectuals and leaders sought liberal reforms that broadened black opportunity in terms of existing structures, rather than large-scale change. The South African Native National Congress (SANNC), later to become the ANC, of which Manisi was an active member, was created in 1912 by members of the educated black elite who claimed Christianity and liberalism as part of African tradition. The SANNC’s 1919 constitution mandated peaceful means of redress and, included within the scope of the passive approach, it advocated the use of education and literature to extend black interests. The influence of mission education on the Cape Xhosa elite was considerable. Most of them went to school at Lovedale in the Tyumie Valley. Isabel Hofmeyr points out that this place, where the first mission station in the Cape was established, where Soga was born, and where Manisi went to school at Lovedale, was ‘the focus of the earliest mission endeavours in the African interior and the most heavily missionized spot on the inland subcontinent’ (2004: 117). Lovedale established an educated, Xhosa literary community that shared reading and writing practices, and that regularly engaged in debate and discussion in the context of the Lovedale Literary Society, which comprised staff and students.
Missionaries used education and literacy as tools of conversion – they believed that Western education would draw local populations away from uncivilised tribal affiliations. Literacy, they knew, was necessary to facilitate the ‘civilising’ education they brought and, more importantly, their converts’ personal engagements with the Bible. After Ntsikana, perhaps the most famous early Xhosa convert