Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
environment weathered by all black writers in South Africa who sought to reach vernacular audiences in print. Chapman catalogues the obstacles facing black poets: their hoped-for reading publics were only narrowly literate and had little disposable cash to spend on book buying; publishing imperatives stipulated school-going readerships; and as apartheid strengthened so too did the liberation struggle’s cultural aversion to tribal heritage and to vernacular publications. Helping to forge the last of these constraints, struggle poets appropriated oral praises and the techniques of oral performance into their hybrid written poetry,9 but emptied their work of ethnic significance and wrote in English, which seemed to them to be ‘non-ethnic and unifying in the urban situation’ (Chapman 1996: 334). The shift in publishing geography evidenced in Chapman’s trajectory from rural to urban poetry, and from rural vernaculars to urban englishes, reflects the rise of struggle culture, whose producers came from and were concerned in their work to address audiences in townships and urban hostels.10
As noted, Manisi was schooled in the missionary tradition of liberalism and moderation, but he was nevertheless powerfully attached to traditional structures of authority and was critical of colonial and missionary motives. At the start of his public career in 1946, there seemed to Manisi to be no contradiction in his simultaneous dedication to chieftaincy and his membership of the ANC – both attachments seemed to the poet to promote black solidarity and dignity. Traditional leaders, many of them mission educated, had in fact helped to create and, initially, to lead the SANNC. Yet, as part of the polarisation of politics during apartheid, liberation organisations like the ANC increasingly distanced themselves from traditional politics, which they felt had become irrevocably tainted by apartheid as well as irrelevant to urban township life. In an interview with Opland (2005) in November 1985, Manisi explains his early nationalism as well as his response to Mathanzima’s support of the homeland programme, declaring that he confronted Mathanzima outspokenly on his support for the Nationalist government’s provision of power to chiefs rather than to the people.
For Manisi, the institution of chieftaincy existed to serve the unity and prosperity of the people, and did not preclude the necessity and agency of other political institutions at the multiracial national level. In the poet’s definition, tradition was that which fostered bonds of obligation, trust and common humanity among people. This sense of rural politics and custom was not inherently conservative, yet it was rendered conservative and dismissed by the binaried politics of apartheid. That many chiefs were in fact complicit with apartheid, and that the imbongi’s conventional freedoms were undermined in publishing and performance contexts by apartheid institutions and legislation, meant that appeals to chiefs – like those made by Manisi – were easily criticised for their apparent subscription to the political status quo. Whereas Manisi’s guiding principles made use of history in ways that owed a debt to his rural-based intellectual predecessors, urban resistance writers used history in new ways to reflect militant ideals. For example, like Mqhayi, Wauchope, Gqoba and many others, Manisi revered the prophet-convert Ntsikana, whose politics of black unity was moderate. In one of his historical poems for Opland, performed in 1970, Manisi excuses Ntsikana and blames Makana (otherwise known as Nxele, and by scholars today as Makhanda11), Ntsikana’s contemporary and opponent, for ills that befell the Rharhabe. Resistance and protest writers preferred to enlist the example of Makana, however, because of his later rejection of Christianity and his abortive but brave attacks against colonial forces.12 Chapman argues that ‘in the Black Consciousness poetry of the 1970s, Makana was given iconic significance as a figure of resistance while the political prison, Robben Island, was renamed the Isle of Makana’ (1996: 105).13
The rise of black city voices of resistance whose oppositional tactics were unlike Manisi’s in important respects, the appearance of a few brave publishers who would disseminate black writing in English, and a growing urban repudiation of rural-based tradition, seen as nothing more than backward, divisive practice, left Manisi intellectually and ideologically stranded, his terms of reference suddenly overburdened, his desired publics divided, and his personal loyalties out of synch with one another. Indeed, in making a special case for the Zulu poets who had adapted izibongo to trade union contexts and to print form, Ari Sitas implies the binary potentials of praise poetry during apartheid: these trade union poets ‘and their vernacular noises, their pushing outwards of the expressive resources of poetry in Zulu, are no apartheid adjustments, nor are they tribal embarrassments’ (1994: 152). In the eyes of these proletarian poets, Manisi, rural imbongi, was just such a ‘tribal embarrassment’. Constrained by narrow publishing imperatives, estranged from the primary subject of his early poetry, and increasingly isolated, intellectually and geographically, from the broad appeal and legitimacy of urban protest, Manisi nevertheless tenaciously pursued publication throughout his career. In the next chapter, I suggest how he reconceived of the mechanics of print publication as a way of writing for future audiences, which he tried to address in terms of their Xhosa and larger black identities. The remainder of this chapter explores Manisi’s conflicting attitudes to mutually implicating subjects – education, writing, black liberation and racial oppression – in order to suggest his reasons for valuing the written word despite his sense of its violent colonial origins.
Dignity, history, education and the record
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