Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
distinguished warrior clan who were spear-bearers to the prestigious amaHala chiefs. Manisi was educated for short periods at Khundulu community school, at Freemantle and at Lovedale, the latter a mission school from which he was expelled in 1948 for having participated in an aggressive praising contest with a boy from a rival clan. Manisi continued his education at Mathanzima Secondary School, but had to leave and find work to support his family when his father became ill. He always regretted his lack of further education, as his poetry attests, and supplemented his learning with a rigorous programme of reading in ‘English, Xhosa and History’. It was ‘through this energetic reading’, the poet writes in his 1983 autobiographical notes, ‘that I acquired vast information about my people’s history and how she came to meet other peoples’ (Opland 2005: 18).
Between 1944 and 1945, before he was admitted to Lovedale, Manisi worked as a migrant labourer in the western Cape. After leaving Mathanzima Secondary School, he worked for six months in the eastern Cape city of Port Elizabeth, one of South Africa’s most important industrial centres. Between 1951 and 1958, when he was ‘dismissed for [his] political ideas’, Manisi was a clerk in the Native Recruiting Corporation (Opland 2005: 18). In 1952 he joined the ANC and in the late 1950s he was the secretary of the ANC branch in Queenstown. In 1960, the year in which black organisations were banned in South Africa, Manisi spent five months in an East London prison for his political involvement, but upon his release continued to work for the ANC until Queenstown authorities harassed him to the point that he felt compelled to return to the Khundulu valley. Shortly after his return home, Manisi attempted to attend a conference in Paarl but was again arrested and imprisoned for three days. In his autobiographical sketch, Manisi mentions nothing of his connection to the ANC and political activism. He claims that he spent the decade between 1958 and 1968 farming (Opland 2005). In 1968, he returned to clerking, this time for the Hala Tribal Authority, which was headed by Chief Manzezulu Mthikrakra. Between 1974 and 1982, he was a clerk at the Labour and Lands offices in Lady Frere. Between 1952 and 1983 – in which years he was, for varying periods, Mathanzima’s imbongi, a migrant labourer, a farmer, a clerk, a political activist and, as we shall see, a fieldwork subject and university employee – Manisi was also a writer who published five original volumes of poetry (Yali-Manisi 1952, 1954, 1977, 1980, 1983). None of his books earned him money and all are now out of print. In the first part of his career, Manisi was widely acclaimed as a great poet. He rose to prominence at the age of 21 when, in 1947, he performed at the national Ntsikana Day celebrations6 in Grahamstown. His performance greatly impressed his audience: the organiser of the celebrations, JT Arosi, accorded him the title Imbongi Entsha (‘The new poet’), and invited him to perform at subsequent Ntsikana Day celebrations. Opland (2005) notes that Arosi’s choice of title for Manisi sets the poet in a special literary lineage: he had inherited the mantle of the great Xhosa imbongi, SEK Mqhayi. In the early part of his public career, then, Manisi earned the respect and recognition of his audiences and literary contemporaries, and was tacitly recognised as official imbongi to Chief Mathanzima.
In 1955, Manisi broke from Mathanzima, whose growing complicity with Pretoria was repugnant to the poet. However, he continued to perform at events of public significance, such as Mathanzima’s reception of an honorary doctorate at Fort Hare University in 1974, and Transkei’s ‘independence’ celebrations at Mthatha in 1976. In 1970, Manisi met Jeff Opland in the course of the scholar’s fieldwork expeditions in Transkei. Between 1970 and 1976, Opland recorded several poems by Manisi in fieldwork conditions as well as in ceremonial contexts. In 1977, Opland arranged for Manisi to perform at the Grahamstown Performing Arts Festival, attended largely by English-speaking audiences. This was the first in a long series of what Opland and Manisi termed their ‘lecture-demonstrations’. For five weeks in 1979, again through Opland’s intervention, Manisi became the Traditional Artist in Residence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, where he performed for largely uncomprehending audiences with Opland present as lecturer and co-translator. Manisi’s increasing involvement with the university led to his publication of two volumes of original poetry under the auspices of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University, as part of the Institute’s Xhosa Text Series.
Between 1982 and 1985, Manisi was a research officer at Rhodes where he continued to run lecture-demonstrations with Opland. He also went into the field to gather primary material and interview informants, and undertook the work of transcribing and translating other poets’ poetry. In this way, he gathered a first-hand understanding of some of the mediatory practices to which his own poetry was subjected for critical reading. The height of the academic part of his career came in 1988 when he was a Fulbright Scholar at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. There he produced poetry for American audiences, again under the rubric that he and Opland had worked out for mediating performance to audiences unfamiliar with the language and form in which they were addressed. After returning to South Africa, Manisi performed before English-speaking academic audiences for the last time in Durban at a conference on orality. Opland describes the two poems Manisi produced in Durban in July 1988 as his last performances. In June of 1988, the poet had taken up a post as a research officer at the University of Transkei (Unitra), where he had worked intermittently before. In a paper on Unitra’s post-apartheid institutional crisis, Adam Habib encapsulates the university’s woeful trajectory: ‘Established in 1977 by the homeland regime to showcase its newly found “independence” and create at least the façade of statehood, it is now a monument to apartheid’s folly’ (2001: 157–158). It is a telling ending to Manisi’s academic career that he should have found himself working for, and under the sign of, an educational institution able to provide him with isiXhosa-speaking audiences, yet so much the bitter fruit of apartheid. Despite his deteriorating health and his growing reliance on alcohol, Manisi may well have produced some poetry in the short time before his dismissal from Unitra. If he did perform izibongo in this period, no one has written of it and Opland’s archive bears no trace of it.
Despite the apparent variety of his employment record, Manisi was also frequently jobless, a casualty of the apartheid system despite his talents, and for much of the decade before his death in September 1999, he was unemployed, ill, destitute and silent as a performer and writer. He never performed in the ‘new’ South Africa. He never met Mandela. Despite the poet’s unrelenting efforts to find audiences, Mandela never knew, before Manisi died, of the 1954 poem addressed to Earth Tremor, and Manisi’s neighbours did not know whose gravesite Opland sought when he asked for directions to the burial place of the great imbongi who had lived among them. That Manisi died in total obscurity, no longer recognised as an imbongi in his own neighbourhood, suggests how far the poet’s reputation had receded from its early swell.
Manisi’s poetry was sensitive to the complexities of life in a country in which both he and his literary tradition were rooted. Although he desired peaceful coexistence in South Africa for all races, he was keenly aware of the historical injustices perpetrated against the Xhosa people, their political institutions and their land. In a remarkable 34-minute-long poem, performed at Opland’s request, Manisi gives his account of the pre-colonial traverse and use of land by isiXhosa-speaking communities, as well as the struggle over territory that followed colonial settlement and expansion in the Cape. He concludes by recounting the capture and removal to Robben Island of several important Xhosa chiefs who had defied colonial rule. This moment of colonial betrayal is the bedrock of Manisi’s political understanding. Throughout his poetry he is concerned with the restoration of land and dignity to the Xhosa people. While the pain of colonial dispossession runs through Manisi’s poetry like a dark valley, the poet offers education as the key to black liberation and he is uncompromising before academic audiences about their obligation to supply funding and opportunity for black learning. Despite the power of his poetic claims, however, the trajectory of his career – from widely admired poet of his chief’s court to little-known quasi-researcher, quasi-performer at academic institutions – suggests starkly the declining possibilities for his traditional address.
Manisi’s poetry attests to his divided desires: on the one hand, he yearned for the impossible restoration of an obliterated, pre-colonial community and landscape, while on the other, he argued for the need of finding ways in which all South Africans could come to coexist equally and peaceably. In his poetry, these different impulses are expressed in Manisi’s construction of his audiences as members of particular political communities. He frequently addressed