Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
name ‘Tribes of Phalo’, Phalo being one of the great Xhosa ancestors who ruled in pre-colonial times and who represents, in Manisi’s revisionist understanding, Xhosa independence.7 In performing for, or referring to, white audiences, Manisi spoke of ‘Tribes of Nonibe’, a title that carries the burden of the poet’s contradictory feelings about the multiracial national reality: Nonibe, the wife of a Ndlambe chief, was the daughter of a white woman who had been shipwrecked in the eighteenth century off the Pondoland coast. Out of loyalty to her mother, Nonibe offered protection to vulnerable white settlers (Mostert 1992; Opland 1998). In Manisi’s construction, the whites he addresses are culpable for the historical injustices perpetrated against the Xhosa by their settler ancestors. At the same time, however, the Xhosa are no longer the independent nation of the poet’s desire: they live in an irreversibly infiltrated landscape in which they too are responsible for the white presence. For Manisi, dispossession, deprivation and division is born among Africans as a consequence of colonisation.
This book focuses on Manisi’s public career in a study of the particular modes of address and textuality through which the poet laboured to communicate with his diverse audiences across the many cultural and linguistic divisions, geographies and political complexities of identity that define South African life. Manisi was committed to the political function of his art and sought always to appeal to his audiences, even when they could not understand the language of his poetry, as political agents who are duty bound to restore equilibrium and justice to the polities of which they are constituents. As a rural, Xhosa poet whose career spanned the apartheid period, Manisi performed and wrote in an increasingly polarised political context. On the one hand, Pretoria co-opted many of the imbongi’s customary terms of address – those related to ethnicity, rural identity, chieftainship and tradition – by artificially bolstering the power of chiefs and by proposing to ‘free’ rural geographies for black occupation and self-rule. On the other hand, the terms in which black resistance could legitimately be expressed were determined by the African nationalist liberation struggle, which increasingly eschewed the categories of ‘non-white’ identity that apartheid discourse had occupied and distorted, in favour of a revalorised, non-ethnic and inclusive black identity.
Poets like Manisi, who expressed local, rural and ethnic, as well as pan-African and nationalist identities in a form associated with the rural chieftaincy and in a language defined by Pretoria as ‘ethnic’, could find few sympathetic audiences among black nationalists and few rural contexts in which their freedom to criticise wrong behaviour and politics was respected. Manisi nevertheless used every opportunity he received to address Xhosa and other audiences: he wrote newspaper and book poetry in the hope of projecting his words into the large world of print circulation; he addressed Transkeian gatherings in the hope of persuading Mathanzima to return to the promise of his early leadership; he accepted various terms of employment at universities in South Africa and the United States of America so that he could exhort privileged audiences to share their resources with destitute Africans.
This book makes the case that Manisi demonstrated considerable ingenuity in addressing his difficult audiences and that he exploited the capacities of different media and of the praise poem genre to increase his chances of finding, and indeed helping to create, sympathetic publics. Nevertheless, the history of Manisi’s career, after its early promise, is one of frustration and marginalisation. After 1955, Manisi’s published poetry had no contemporary readership; after the mid-1950s, his Transkeian poetry compromised his political vision; and he was isolated by his later academic contexts, in which his English-speaking audiences provoked his anger and largely misunderstood his poetry. As a way of circumventing these failures, Manisi increasingly conceived of his poetry as a legacy that should be left to future publics; to this end he used the slim opportunities of book publication and academic enquiry to record his art as a durable product that could find new audiences in the future. The archive of his recorded and published poetry nevertheless encodes the difficulties Manisi faced in articulating his various loyalties, and testifies to the poet’s sense of the constraints on his freedom of expression. My engagement with the poet’s rich corpus of available poetry takes what might be understood as a primarily symptomatic approach to interpretation. I have ventured that many of Manisi’s poems for the record reveal their ‘affliction’ by their context of production. Rather than repeat the project undertaken by Opland and other scholars of Xhosa poetry, aimed at elaborating the genre, elucidating references and demonstrating how Xhosa praise poetry is instantiated by different poets, I hope to engage the scars in Manisi’s poetry – those sites of strain and damage and counter-efforts at repair at which a world and a poetic sensibility proved mutually inhospitable.
Praise poetry and the mandate of the praise poet
The institution of the praise poet, in its various forms throughout Africa, is widely recognised and respected.8 What links distinctive traditions across the continent under the common rubric of a special and pervasive African form is their mode of addressing and naming their subjects with epithets that are compact and allusive, and that often hint at, rather than detail, relationships and incidents. Names are the main components of the genre. Karin Barber explores the implications of this in her book on the anthropology of texts, persons and publics: ‘Names and their expansions are the kernel of social reputation, the index of self-realisation, and the vehicles of survival beyond death. Names are the nodes through which multiple links and affiliations with other names pass’ (2007: 135). That a praise poem is an assemblage of names which have such far-ranging functions within and beyond the scope of the life they identify suggests something of the complex ontology of the genre. A recognised praise poet in the Xhosa tradition, who is mandated to characterise the society and its leaders with particular authority, is a specialist in the recollection and recombination of established names as well as in the formulation of fresh designations.
Scholars agree that praise poets act as mediators who effect change by strengthening existing bonds and encouraging actions and attitudes based on values extrapolated from (reinvented) histories. The poetry itself is energetic, rousing and interspersed with bursts of dislocated narrative amidst epithet and metaphor. Each tradition of praise poetry has a distinctive style of performance: in the Zulu practice, for example, where considerable value is placed on memorising important izibongo for redeployment in new circumstances, recitation is fast-paced and breathtakingly impressive to the eye and the ear; in the spontaneous and improvisatory genre of Xhosa izibongo, the poet declaims more slowly and deliberately, in a gruff and growling voice. In both Zulu and Xhosa forms, the traditional poet might brandish spears with which he pierces the air to punctuate his poetry, and he is often dressed in skins that denote his clan affiliation.
The southern African praise poet has historically held a position of considerable political influence: inherent to his art is the licence to criticise with impunity those who come within his poetry’s purview. Leroy Vail and Landeg White (1991) have argued that poetic licence constitutes the common basis on which all southern African praise forms operate, whether they are traditionally oriented or popular adaptations. Although these writers contend that the licence is attached to the form and not to the performer, it seems more accurate to suggest that a performer cannot avail his poetry of the special political immunity dictated by convention unless he demonstrates his performance authority to the satisfaction of his audiences. The poet is always accountable both to the conventions of his form and to his audience, and so the most outspoken and valued praise poet creates for himself a reputation that is often widely proclaimed by his listeners.
Opland (1983, 1998) explains that the imbongi’s political role is focused on social regulation: on the task of persuading his audiences to moderate excessive behaviour according to the norms reflected in the balancing world of his poetry. In South Africa, the praise poet of the chiefdom is associated with the countryside – a rural hinterland in the imagination of politically dominant urban centres and, for urban-based industry, a repository of latent labour supply. In their urban adaptations of the izibongo form for worker and, more recently, large-scale national gatherings, worker praise poets have laboured to shed their associations with the paradigm of the chiefdom, and have established through their poetry new ‘communities’ of relation (the proletariat, the multicultural nation) within which to mediate and encourage stability. In the mid-1980s, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, trade union praise poets arose out of worker communities to mediate between unions and their ethnically