Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
to Mathanzima were premised on rooted beliefs: first, that chieftaincy represented and embodied the wealth and well-being of the chiefdom, and second, that Mathanzima had been blessed with great promise and was capable of returning to the interests of his people. That his belief in Mathanzima seemed in 1955 to be on the brink of profound disappointment never diminished Manisi’s foundational faith in the institution of traditional leadership. That year must be understood, then, as a crisis point in the young poet’s literary career, the first of many such moments when beliefs that had once seemed easily compatible were suddenly incongruent. Manisi’s silence in immediate media suggests his difficulty in finding an appropriate public stance that could accommodate criticism of an unfolding partnership between chiefs and apartheid’s architects, while still honouring the institution of chieftaincy. It also suggests his intellectual isolation – suddenly there was no immediate newspaper public from which he could seek support and reply.
The vernacular press, ‘Bantu Education’ and resistance literature
The Lovedale Press, which was part of the Lovedale Mission, was largely responsible for stimulating and enabling Xhosa book publication in the early nineteenth century, when its primary task was to provide copies of the translated Bible and related Xhosa texts to its converts. In her study of the ways in which translations of The Pilgrim’s Progress entered into and helped create African public spheres, Hofmeyr (2004) discusses Soga’s (1868) Xhosa translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Uhambo lo Mhambi comprises a translation of the first part of Bunyan’s book. The second part was translated by Soga’s son, John Henderson Soga, and published in 1929. Hofmeyr writes that ‘students entering Lovedale were … to encounter an environment that was Bunyan saturated and they were to meet him in both Xhosa and English in an array of forums’ (2004: 120). She shows how, at the height of its influence between the 1870s and the 1940s (a period that includes Manisi’s education), Bunyan’s text ‘informed the political discussion of the elite and provided a set of metaphors for debating questions of how to fashion an African modernity’ (Hofmeyr 2004: 135).
In addition to European religious texts, however, Lovedale Press was also interested in promoting Xhosa narrative and poetry as supports for literacy and a ‘civilised’ literature. The published products had to conform to missionary imperatives. Opland explains that at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers like Mqhayi were constrained by the Press’s intervention against what it perceived as evidence in submissions of the overly traditional and tribal. Missionary censorship was, however, inconsistently applied, so that AC Jordan, for example, was allowed free range in his writing, whereas several manuscripts submitted by Mqhayi were rejected and are consequently lost to the world. According to Peires (1980), Lovedale refused submissions that were critical of the British or of missionaries, that highlighted ethnic differences or that commented contentiously on contemporary politics. Lovedale was nevertheless a prolific publisher of Xhosa writers but, as Opland (1984) points out, the Press had to concern itself increasingly with commercial realities and could not afford to publish books that had no reasonable prospect of selling. One of the certain and expanding markets for book consumption was schools, and publication requirements accordingly came to be shaped increasingly by the demands of schools for textbooks and school readers.
The demands of the school market affected the publication of Mqhayi’s classic Ityala lamawele. Lovedale wished to publish an abridged version for school prescription, in the service of which much detail essential to Mqhayi’s historical and political focus would have to be excised. Mqhayi agreed to the expurgated version on condition that the original version should be printed in addition. According to Peires, Mqhayi’s preface in the original version was ‘addressed to chiefs, councillors, ladies and gentlemen and boasts that it contains the “essence” of Xhosa writing’ (1980: 79). The school version addressed itself to pupils, the government, the Department of Education (which Mqhayi thanked for the version’s school circulation) and the Department of Justice (which was thanked by the poet for its use of his text ‘in Xhosa-language examinations for magistrates’) (Peires 1980: 79). For Mqhayi, it seems, the original version of his book contained his intended message and legacy to the men and women of his community. The abridged school version, addressed to school and government officials, was a compromise in the service of revenue, as well as textual circulation and use. This divorce between authorial meaning and intended address on the one hand, and circulation and reception on the other, supplies a telling example of the constraints upon twentieth-century Xhosa writers.
In its 1953 Bantu Education Act, the National Party government ordained an education system for black people that Manisi describes in his performance at Harvard in 1988 as being ‘impoverished./It’s intended for idiots and cretins’ (Opland 2005: 306). Syllabi privileging the teaching of practical skills were devised to prepare black children for their subordinate place in the labour market. The medium of black education was to be primarily the majority local African language. Chapman summarises the effect of the system:
Bantu Education eroded the mission schools, spread ‘vernacular’ and ‘ethnic’ education widely but thinly and, in its philosophy, reinforced the design of apartheid according to which the different African ethnic groups were regarded as having different, ‘primitive’ cultures that had little to do with the English language above levels of functional literacy and less to do with change in the scientific and technological world. (1996: 215)
Bantu Education changed the vernacular publishing industry from a fairly liberal institution to one that met the nationalist agenda: Afrikaans publishing houses wrested the monopoly on the vernacular education market from Lovedale Press, which had for so long encouraged Xhosa writers. In Chapman’s assessment, there is ‘[l]ittle African-language writing produced for schools under the strictures of Bantu Education’ that has ‘re-evaluative potential’. Generally, he argues, ‘the large themes of acculturation and transition’ that were explored in earlier Xhosa literature ‘have been trivialised [in the later literature] into trite endorsements of the exotic tribal land’ (1996: 216).
Those like Manisi, who began writing as apartheid issued its founding legislation, faced a frustrating new publishing world that was both discouraging and scarcely credible. Chapman reminds us of the promise the decade preceding apartheid’s implementation had held for African language writers: in 1936 and 1937, African authors’ conferences were held; a Literature Committee had been established and was led by prominent black intellectuals; and Lovedale Press was an active publisher. The suddenness with which this publishing scene collapsed under apartheid must have been very difficult for aspirant writers like Manisi to accept. In addition, vernacular writers faced the terrible irony that, although Bantu Education increased the need for vernacular texts (of a narrow kind), African language writing was co-opted wholesale, by virtue of its language of expression rather than its subject matter, into the Nationalist government’s strategy of ethnic division.
Opland summarises the fate of book publication in isiXhosa in this way: ‘If in the first half of the [twentieth] century … only Xhosa works in harmony with Lovedale’s mission philosophy were likely to appear, in the second half of the century only Xhosa works suitable for prescription in school are likely to appear’. The result of this shift in publishing focus, in Opland’s view, is that ‘an adult literature has not yet evolved in Xhosa’ (1984: 185). Constraining writers still further, school inspectors like HW Pahl, who recommended suitable material for school prescription, determined the range of themes and messages writers could express, and sometimes what form they should employ if they hoped their books might circulate. For instance, Pahl preferred to prescribe narrative poetry rather than lyrical poems or, even less palatable to him, traditional Xhosa izibongo.
In an interview conducted by two Vassar College students in the United States in 1988, Manisi was asked to describe his publishing environment. His response suggests his frustration as an imbongi who felt called to write about urgent and contentious political matters:
for one to be a writer he must try that the books he writes would fit the schools. You must write rubbish, let me say so. You must write rubbish, not tell the truth about the situation. If you want to write a book about poetry, so you just have to talk about trees, rivers and all my nothings. (Opland 2005: 325)
Manisi’s poetry depends on the convention that the imbongi