Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
university education (which he pursued in Europe) and to be ordained as a minister (Chapman 1996; Hofmeyr 2004). Soga’s writings testify, Chapman writes, ‘to his utter involvement in the acculturation process’ (1996: 107). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cape Nguni had strenuously rejected missionary education, refusing to relinquish beliefs, identities and forms of polity to which they considered themselves bound by long and authoritative histories. However, after successive defeats against colonial forces in frontier wars, and when famine and defeat had settled on rural communities following the devastating cattle killing of 1857, that which had been solid – the chiefdom and the authority of the chief – seemed increasingly insubstantial and unstable. Many sought employment in colonial economies; others sought education in preparation for changing socio-economic futures, although the number of Xhosa who were schooled remained small.
The increasing attraction of mission education in the mid-1800s was accompanied by the rise of debates among white administrators and among black intellectuals about the purpose of black education in southern African colonies. The growth of the education debate parallels an increasing unease among many black intellectuals concerning their relationships to African and colonial worlds. Chapman argues that a sudden surge of racial discrimination following the annexation of Xhosa territory to the Cape Colony in 1877 meant that the position of accommodation between African and colonial worlds that had been adopted by Soga was no longer credible or desirable to all members of the educated elite. The Soga figure was represented in several colonial stories, Chapman asserts, as ‘the Christianised kaffir who, as the product of misguided notions of humanitarian integration, is left severely displaced’ (1996: 109). Iimbongi of the time also began to appeal to their Xhosa audiences to unite as Africans, and expressed scorn for African Christians. Chapman identifies the shift in late nineteenth-century Xhosa literature ‘from Soga’s confidence in Christianity to a political consciousness concerning the need for education, organisation and unity’ (1996: 109).
Following early missionary policy, one argument informing the black education debate that was to assume priority among black intellectuals and white government officials was for the education of a black elite along the lines of their European counterparts, so that an educated stratum might in turn lead and enlighten the masses. (Indeed, as William Beinart [1994] suggests, early African nationalists were uncertain about how they would incorporate the uneducated masses into their rather hazy vision of non-racialism.) Other white administrators advocated a strategy that was to find favour with apartheid governments in their Bantu Education scheme: the black population should be educated for their inevitable place in a labour force that would power white industry. Between these poles were other perspectives, each concerned with which segments of black communities should be educated, to what extent, with what species of syllabus, and to what end. The black education debate has been one of the most important, era-spanning issues in South African politics and race relations, and was a major subject of Manisi’s later poetry before academic audiences. The debate also shaped the context in which Manisi was provided with a brief education in the last days of the era of mission schooling, and in which he became a writer.
Although it was coercive in many respects, the education that was offered by mission institutions was incomparably superior to that provided by apartheid’s Bantu schools. Lovedale was concerned with engaging students’ minds and shaping their sensibilities by exposing them to European history, literature and music. Records of the discussions and debates that took place in the Lovedale Literary Society suggest that early black intellectuals were concerned with a range of questions. Lovedale teachers hoped that the Society would inculcate within its members a sense of literature as moral and ‘high’ art, and some critics have argued that the history of the forum provides ‘yet further evidence of the alienated black Englishness of the Lovedale elite’ (Hofmeyr 2004: 124). Certainly, there were papers on subjects such as the battle of Waterloo, Cromwell’s place in English history, Wordsworth’s poetry, and the reign of various British monarchs. Yet, Hofmeyr shows that black students were equally immersed in local questions related to agriculture, education, gender roles, forms of government, modernity and ‘civilisation’, tradition and custom, and ‘how to shape public opinion (pulpit and press)’ (2004: 125). The range suggests the relative intellectual freedom enjoyed by the early elite.
The mix of issues dealt with by students also suggests their position between Xhosa and European tradition. Hofmeyr argues that the Literary Society:
[f]unctioned as one forum for defining the interests of this new African (and largely male) elite. This group occupied a complex social position between traditional chiefs, white missionaries, and rabidly racist settlers. In relation to chiefs, the elite stressed their modernity; in relation to missionaries, their knowledge of African tradition; and in relation to settlers, their superior claims to ‘civilisation’. (2004: 125)
Although some members of the elite were more Africanist than others, who were still devoted to European ideals of refinement, the sense Hofmeyr gives us of their complex position is that all of them felt certain of their authority to express their worldviews to audiences which, they felt equally confident, would receive and respond to their statements and writings. Chiefs and traditional society, missionaries, and colonials – the triangle of orientation and address in which the early elite operated – had broken up into new and even cruder political communities by the time Manisi assumed his position on the Xhosa literary scene.
In an essay entitled ‘Fighting with the Pen: The Appropriation of the Press by Early Xhosa Writers’, Opland (2003) discusses the late nineteenth-century newspaper poetry of WW Gqoba and IW Wauchope. Both were educated at Lovedale where they were members of the Lovedale Literary Society. Gqoba became a member of the Native Education Association, which was established in 1879, and Wauchope was instrumental in forming Imbumba Yamanyama4 in 1882. Imbumba was ‘one of the earliest political associations for blacks in South Africa’ (Opland 2003: 23) and was specifically opposed to the Afrikaner Bond. Gqoba became the editor of Isigidimi samaXhosa (‘The Xhosa Express’) in 1888, where he encouraged and contributed to ‘an unprecedented efflorescence of literary and ethnographic’ pieces (Opland 2003: 16). Wauchope was among the many contributors to Gqoba’s paper.
The subjects that the two poets wrote about suggest the influences on the early elite (mission education, the chiefdom, and colonial politics) discussed by Hofmeyr. Opland argues that, although Gqoba and Wauchope sometimes bow to the missionary influence, they express a powerful Africanism that finds an outlet in the different literary strategies each developed. Gqoba’s long poem ‘Great Debate on Education’ was published in instalments in Isigidimi, and eventually took 1 150 lines. Written in trochaic octosyllabics, the poem was indebted for its characters’ allegorical titles to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was the second most important text (after the Bible) in mission education. The speakers in the poem present their various views on education, some in favour of the learning given to blacks and some vehemently opposed. Those opposed argue for a syllabus devoid of alien subjects and languages, like Latin, Hebrew and Greek (Opland 2003). Opland argues that the debate format of the poem allows Gqoba to appear to privilege the final judgement that black education is sufficient as it is when in fact the body of the poem provides strong arguments against the arbiter’s conclusion.
Across his writing, Wauchope often expressed contradictory beliefs. Sometimes he wrote of the need to eradicate barbarism among rural African people, claiming that customs like circumcision separated black people from God and salvation. But he often defended Xhosa tradition and rural practices. Both he and Gqoba were strong supporters of the Xhosa prophet Ntsikana and urged political unity among black people. In a March 1884 edition of Isigidimi, Wauchope claims Ntsikana as his source of inspiration ‘and identifies education as the key to the national struggle’ (Opland 2003: 25). Black unity, as exhorted by Ntsikana, and equal education would be the basis of Manisi’s political beliefs but, unlike Wauchope and Gqoba, Manisi would find it difficult to reconcile the contradictions in his outlook because he could not rely on coherent and legitimate political communities or, indeed, immediate readerships. Wauchope and Gqoba, on the other hand, had a clear sense of their audiences: when they addressed Xhosa readers in Xhosa, Opland claims, they worked to instil in them a sense of ‘pride and faith in their own system of morality’, and when they wrote in English for mixed audiences,