Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
Another member of the late nineteenth-century black elite, and the editor of South Africa’s first vernacular non-missionary newspaper, JT Jabavu illustrates in his life and career the way in which the black education question and the influence of white control informed the modes and subjects of communication among the black literati of his day. Imvo zabantsundu (‘Native Opinion’), Jabavu’s paper, first appeared in November 1884 and was funded by the Afrikaner Bond. Because of its Afrikaner backing, Imvo was sympathetic to the Afrikaans position against the English, and was never free of white control despite its black editorship. Jabavu’s ideas were in line with those of white liberal thinkers – he believed in a top-down system of education that would create an educated black elite. For the masses, he advocated a basic education, arguing that modernisation should be left in the hands of the highly educated minority. According to Cross, Imvo reflected its editor’s politics of symbiotic ‘opposition and collaboration’ in that it represented ‘perhaps the most moderate and even conservative section of the African petty bourgeoisie’ (1992: 48). The paper was a prominent forum for the discussion of education policy, and came to be seen in 1916 as the official mouthpiece of the South African Native College at Fort Hare, a tertiary education institution created for black South Africans by a group of black intellectuals, one of whom was Jabavu.
Imvo was Eurocentric in its editorial policies concerning permissible literature and literary practice. Original poetry was frequently published in its pages, but the poetry was always in Western style. The izibongo that did appear in Imvo were historical, offered as monuments rather than as commentary or as supporting evidence for historical articles. In 1897, a rival newspaper called Izwi labantu (‘The Voice of the People’) set up business, again subject to white control that was personified in the figure of Cecil John Rhodes, the English entrepreneur and media magnate who backed the paper financially. While Izwi was progressive and political it was also sympathetic to the English position against that of the Afrikaners, so that in the textual rivalry between Imvo and Izwi there was also at play the opposition between different settler interests. Unlike Imvo, Izwi encouraged submissions of original, politically charged izibongo – one of its editors, the poet Mqhayi, contributed copious praise poems in response. Accordingly, Opland has characterised Izwi as a ‘rallying ground for the educated black elite’ (1998: 243) – although the fact that the paper ran only until 1909, when it folded for financial reasons, suggests the serious institutional obstacles to black intellectual exchange.
The history of the late nineteenth-century Xhosa newspaper industry reveals that white interests, whether missionary or entrepreneurial, influenced vernacular papers. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, these papers came to be managed by members of the educated black elite for the edification of, and exchange among, other members of a thin educated stratum. Readers were, by definition, educated and, despite alternative and circuitous modes of circulation such as reading aloud to illiterate family members, newspapers targeted a slim segment of Xhosa speakers. Nevertheless, the newspaper medium hosted vigorous intellectual debate among educated Xhosa speakers and vitalised the Xhosa literary scene, which was in rapid decline when Manisi penned his first publications. Among these educated turn-of-the-century readers there was fierce debate not only about education policy and politics but also about literary standards, forms and traditions. The kind of exchange I am referring to is well illustrated in an episode in the rivalry between Imvo and Izwi detailed by Opland.
On 20 November 1900, an Imvo poet, Jonas Ntsiko, published an 86-stanza attack against Izwi’s most prolific writer, Mqhayi, berating him for writing an izibongo critical of important community members and accusing him of plagiarising a praise poem produced by Chief Sarhili’s imbongi. Wandile Kuse (1978) tells us that Ntsiko’s poem was modelled on Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ – each stanza comprising two rhyming couplets, each couplet being eight syllables long. That Ntsiko could identify Mqhayi’s quotation of Sarhili’s poet demonstrates his familiarity with the genre and products of praise poetry. However, Ntsiko does not consider izibongo an appropriate genre in which to write, nor does he deem the form’s literary conventions to be operative in print, in which medium, he suggests, language and form must be proper, sentiment mild, and plagiarism deserves the ‘sound thrashing’ he advocates as Mqhayi’s punishment. Ntsiko’s own quotation of Pope’s style, a borrowing he does not acknowledge, suggests his corrective demonstration of an appropriate, educated form for print poetry. The episode suggests the divisions among black newspaper contributors about the merits of writing praise poems – the question was whether the form was sufficiently ‘literary’, ‘educated’ and able to conform to the conventions of print media. This does not mean that contributors like Ntsiko unequivocally supported colonials, even if they accepted colonial literary conventions. Chapman explains that black writers were growing increasingly disillusioned at the dawn of the twentieth century with the ‘European way’. Ntsiko had objected to the pro-British sentiments of a newspaper to which he was a regular contributor, WW Gqoba’s Isigidimi samaXhosa, demanding ‘that the editor hear the African view after Gqoba had rejected one of his articles as too hostile to the British’ (Chapman 1996: 109).
As noted, the African elite of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘was partly forged in the colonial world and claimed a place in the colonial order’ (Beinart 1994: 85). Intellectuals like JT Jabavu increasingly came under attack for their lack of radicalism as the twentieth century entered its second decade. Chapman argues that ‘[i]n contrast to the Christian liberal ideal, a voice of nascent African nationalism began to manifest itself in the projects and writings of several of Jabavu’s contemporaries and rivals’ (1996: 110). Chapman offers the work of Walter B Rubusana as an example of the transition experienced by many Xhosa intellectuals. Rubusana had translated religious tracts into Xhosa and had been involved in revising the Xhosa translation of the Bible, but as the new black commitments of the early twentieth century became clearer, he ‘found his own Christian commitments increasingly secularised as he attempted to recover African tradition, history and political rights’ (Chapman 1996: 110). Rubusana produced his authoritative anthology of Xhosa proverbs and praise poems in 1906. Entitled Zemk’iinkomo Magwalandini (‘there go your cattle, you cowards’), the volume contains recorded poems gathered from oral sources, reprints previously published texts, and publishes written poetry that had not been used by newspapers.5
Chapman argues that Xhosa writers like Rubusana introduced ‘a discourse of African nationalism’ into twentieth century black literature (1996: 110). But Beinart notes that while ‘[a] growing sense of South Africanism among whites had its mirror image in an explicit attempt to create a more assertive African national identity’, ‘early African nationalists did not become strongly anti-imperial’ (1994: 87, 89). These nationalists continued to believe in multiracial citizenship. According to Beinart, ‘[t]heir politics was born in the optimism imbued by partial incorporation in an imperial world; their political edge came from the shattering of that optimism’ (1994: 89). Writers like Mqhayi reflect this acculturation as well as the shifting attitudes and responses to colonial imports and policies that Beinart suggests. Mqhayi published extensively in newspaper and book form, and performed to rapturous acclaim and enduring memory, as Mandela’s (1994) account of Mqhayi’s performance at his school demonstrates. AC Jordan describes Mqhayi as a popular figure with wide influence and literary significance as a ‘poet, novelist, historian, biographer, journalist, [and] translator’, and gives us a sense of the poet’s eagerness to exploit all available media to communicate: ‘Through the press, by public orations, and in private letters, he had a message of encouragement to give to the social leaders of his people’ (1973: 104, 105).
As editor and contributor, Mqhayi made his early print reputation in the pages of Izwi labantu and in Imvo zabantsundu. His novels include an adaptation of the biblical story Samson and Delilah, uSamson (1907), and UDon Jado (1929), an allegory that, Chapman says, ‘is meant to suggest Mqhayi’s twin allegiances to the chief and the British king’ (1996: 205). Mqhayi also translated C Kingsley Williams’s Aggrey of Africa into isiXhosa (see Mqhayi 1935).6 His most famous work, however, is the multi-styled book Ityala Lamawele (‘The Law Suit of the Twins’) (Mqhayi 1914), which ‘is influenced by the Christian precept of Bunyan’s