Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
be many more than I can yet predict – are mine alone.
My dad, Tom Neser, died last year. He would so have liked to have seen this book. He asked me a great deal about my work in the last years of his life and we had discussions for which I remain deeply grateful.
My sister, Kymm Bingham, is the most dependable, loving, organized and thoughtful of people. Her support, suggestions and care are always at the base of the projects I get done.
Thank you, too, to Bill Wessels and Iain Bingham for support and kindness.
This book is dedicated to my extraordinary mother, Dorothy Wessels, whose capacious love, boundless support and lively interest in all I do are cornerstones of my life.
Michael Titlestad has been warmly encouraging of my work as well as an inspiring example as a scholar. For his companionship, wit and care, and for the conversation of a lifetime, my loving thanks.
Introduction
In an obscure volume of Xhosa poetry entitled Inguqu (‘A Return to the Attack’), written by David Yali-Manisi and published in 1954, there appears a praise poem addressed to Chief Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela, a young Thembu chief who would become South Africa’s first democratically elected president 40 years after Manisi wrote him into poetry. Part character summation, part prophecy and exhortation, Manisi’s izibongo, or praise poem, for Mandela precedes its subject’s transformation into the major symbol around which anti-apartheid commitment would mobilise, and anticipates his future international importance. Although the poet identifies his subject as a royal chief, Manisi places Mandela in an African context of widespread upheaval, and praises him for his service to African groups within and beyond South African borders:
You’ve rendered services to Mbo and Nguni,
to Sotho and Tswana,
to Senzangakhona’s Zulu,
to Swazi and Ndebele,
to Shona, Nyasa, Kalanga;1
you’ve bridged nations great and small,
forging African unity:
all its nations are gripped in one birth pang. (71–72)2
As well as addressing Mandela with his traditional salutation, ‘Hail, Earth Tremor!’, Manisi creates a new and prophetic name for his chief, ‘Gleaming Road’, which predicts Mandela’s future influence:
Hail, Mandela’s gleaming road!
Nations name you Earth Tremor;
the poet names you Gleaming Road:
you set Africa blazing … (72)
Manisi suggests no contradiction in honouring his subject as a Thembu chief who is destined to cast off the signs of custom in order to transcend his Thembu identity. The poet observes:
Piercing needle,
handsome at Mthikrakra’s3 home,
ochre-daubed torso,
Mandela’s son.
Beads and loincloths become him,
Though ochre becomes him he spurns it:
If he’d used it, what might have happened? (72)
Beads, loincloths and ochre are the outward symbols of traditional identity and indicate participation in local codes and customs. Mandela is beautiful when adorned in the costume of his rural community, yet there is value in his refusing ochre, the sign of ‘Red’ identity whose wearers spurn outside groups.4 However, although he has rejected an exclusive Thembu identity, Mandela’s destiny is ordained, and he is given authority by his Thembu birth, as the final stanza attests:
Speak out boldly, son of Zondwa,5
uncowed by genets or wild cats!
Even if death’s in store,
you’ve been prepared to serve
as blood offering for blacks,
for you’re a royal prince.
You were born to bear these trials and burdens,
loads and loads stacked on loads.
May the Lord bless you,
grant you success
in confronting the lackeys of evil.
Let it be so, my chief. (73)
The plurality of circumstance, identity and choice represented by Mandela as a figure, and expressed in Manisi’s poem, are mirrored in different ways by the poet’s array of affiliations and beliefs. In the early 1950s, Manisi was both a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and the official imbongi, or praise poet, of Kaiser Mathanzima’s Thembu chiefdom in Transkei. He was a mission-educated Methodist whose Christianity accommodated ancestral veneration. Throughout his archived poetry, he demands a single South African education system, but he also expresses his wariness of Western culture and his wish to preserve local Xhosa forms of knowledge. His poetry speaks of the need to bring the light of education and Christianity to dark corners of Africa, while at the same time providing anti-colonial histories that interpret missionary activity as having participated in colonial brutality against indigenous populations. Manisi was a proud guardian of the isiXhosa language and of Thembu and Xhosa histories. He was also a pan-African dreamer inspired by the hope of widespread black solidarity. This book examines the ways in which Manisi’s recorded and translated izibongo reflect, resist and sometimes buckle beneath the strain of the identities and beliefs they expressed in the divisive and coercive contexts of apartheid South Africa.
Exceptionally talented, yet relatively little-known outside of the fields of oral and isiXhosa studies, David Manisi laboured in a range of unconducive environments to discharge the manifold duties of the praise poet. The art of the imbongi, as this book will try to show, demands a comprehensive literary, political and mystical mastery. Not least among the praise poet’s mandates is the work of authoritative genealogical mapping. Manisi’s poetry contains many references to lineages and ancestors, and a basic understanding of how these lines and names fit together helps one to read the poetry quoted in this book with greater insight, and also illuminates something of the complexity of association and identity characteristic of southern African communities. A brief note on some of the genealogies to which Manisi refers can be found in the Appendix. Suffice it here to note that the Thembu – to which Mandela belongs, as do Manisi and two important subjects of Manisi’s apartheid poetry, the homeland chief Kaiser Mathanzima and the rightful heir to the Thembu leadership, Sabatha Dalindyebo – are an isiXhosa-speaking group whose history is distinct from that of the main Xhosa line. Despite their distinct histories, however, as a response to colonial incursion, isiXhosa-speaking people began to see themselves increasingly as constituting one nation, which is popularly, if not strictly correctly, known as the Xhosa nation. In its rural manifestation, this ‘nation’ exists locally as chiefdoms with their roots in pre-colonial groups such as the Thembu.
As well as contending in his poetry with other forms of ‘the nation’, such as what might characterise a ‘South African people’, Manisi frequently invokes the ancestors of present-day Xhosa leaders from Thembu, Xhosa and other isiXhosa-speaking lines, all of which in his conception form part of one Xhosa nation. Sometimes these invocations instantiate the capacity of praise poetry, essentially a literature of identity and connection, to represent its subjects both in the microcosm of their homesteads as well as in the matrices of their many larger affiliations. At other times – often in Manisi’s archived poetry, I shall argue – recourse to exclusive affiliations reflects an external strain on the form which militates against the poet’s capacity to envisage, articulate and encourage connections among his constituencies. It is the work of this book to consider, as creatively as possible, how the pressures upon Manisi’s world affected, perhaps at times afflicted, the texts he made.
David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi was born at Khundulu