Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
licences, naming functions and literary devices of rural izibongo, they explicitly eschewed connections to the traditional and to a politics based on heredity. They sought to establish themselves as popular exponents of a revamped, hybridised poetry that nevertheless carried the old aura of authority and legitimacy surrounding the traditional form.
Rural iimbongi – who from the onset of black urbanisation travelled to cities to perform at events of significance to their rural communities, such as when a chief visited gatherings of his migrant labourer constituents at their urban accommodation – have had to contend with many threats to the integrity and legitimacy of their rural polity since colonial settlement and, perhaps most acutely because of the pace and brutality of change, during the apartheid era. In his epic account of the frontier wars fought between the Xhosa and colonists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Noel Mostert argues that when the Xhosa encountered colonial expansion in the Cape, they ‘found themselves selected by history. Upon them fell the brunt of the experience of contact, violent or otherwise, with the outside world. It changed them forever, and set them quite apart in experience and outlook …’ (1992: 185). In Xhosa poetry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which exists now either in transcription or as it was published in early Xhosa newspapers, it is clear that iimbongi were profoundly conscious of happenings in foreign nations, and of ways in which foreigners affected isiXhosa-speaking communities.
Manisi’s poetry, although it was produced during the apartheid era, focuses on colonial encounter, and refers repeatedly to settler communities: British, Boer, French and Germans. Crises inflicted upon rural paradigms by colonial and apartheid regimes are often juxtaposed in critical analysis and, indeed, in many of Manisi’s poems, by an oversimplified model of pre-colonial history and politics, which was in fact fraught with wars, dispossessions and regroupings. These regroupings happened in a fairly fluid space of identity politics in which defections and immigrations were usual. It took the arrival of colonial modes of social and political organisation to delimit identity in more rigid ways, according to ‘tribe’, ‘race’ and geographical location across an evolving urban–rural divide. The eminent historian Terence Ranger, who argued path-breakingly for an approach to African history that takes into account strategies of African resistance, has cautioned that what we tend to neglect in our evaluations of colonial and apartheid intervention in indigenous life is ‘the great disruption involved in drastically narrowing down the African religious, social and economic world while at the same time enlarging the administrative and political’ (1996: 274).
The shape and composition of rural communities have thus been subject to considerable upheaval from pre-colonial times, but in order to deal with the rapidity and scale of change since the wars of colonial dispossession and the concomitant adaptations made by praise poets to their art, scholars have tended to depict the pre-colonial polity as stable and characterised by widespread consensus. What this dichotomy obscures, in addition to larger historical realities, is the daily content of life in pre-colonial communities. Although kinship ties connected groups, strangers and non-relations were always also present among familial communities. Kinship groups were not isolated units – they engaged constantly with one another and dignitaries from one group attended the significant events that took place at the Great Places9 of both neighbouring and far-flung chiefdoms. What was important for some time before colonial occupation was the institution of chieftaincy: representing powerful ancestors, the figure of the hereditary chief provided many southern African polities with a shared political vocabulary and value system.
For the Xhosa, the chief ‘represented the principal force that embodied their communal life and held them together, namely veneration of their ancestors, as well as loyalty to and respect for the bloodlines that bound families, chiefdom and nation’ (Mostert 1992: 198). According to the social anthropologist David Hammond-Tooke, the chief was the:
[s]upreme lawgiver and the head of the administrative system … his court is the final court of appeal for the cases from local courts. He controls the wealth of the tribe and leads the army in war. He is, in fact, the symbol of tribal unity; in his person all the complex emotions which go to form the solidarity of the tribe are centred – he is the tribe. (1954: 34)
To this description, Harvey Campion adds that the chief was ‘commander-in-chief, economic leader, high priest, chief medicine man and spokesman for his people’ (1976: 77). These characterisations reveal why the chief was central both as leader and as institution to Xhosa politics and poetics. But chiefs did not have unlimited powers over their communities. Mostert (1992: 199) shows that a chief’s constituents held him accountable to public feeling and custom in important ways and that because of ‘the dispersed and informal nature of Xhosa society and the lack of any central apparatus through which absolute power could be wielded’, the chief was never free to act as a tyrant. His court was presided over by powerful councillors whom he was bound by custom to consult on all matters of importance, and if he dared impose unilateral and unpopular measures he faced desertion by members of his polity who could, and often did, defect to other chiefdoms. The pervasive ideal, popularly quoted and still in memory today, was that a chief was a chief by virtue of his people – as much as they vested their corporate identity and spirituality in him, so he depended on them for their loyalty and support.
In this political context, the praise poet’s art was one of the valuable means by which the polity’s dissatisfactions and demands could be communicated to the chief. The imbongi also transmitted the people’s great love and respect for their leader and his ancestors. It is as this essential line of communication between people and chief, and as the mystical poet of connection between the living and the dead, that the imbongi enters scholarship. Historically, Xhosa iimbongi affirmed the institution of chieftaincy and strengthened the polity by invoking the grace and favour of the ancestors who were held to have powerful influence over the deeds and fates of the living. But the poet also addressed the chief in terms that confirmed his many obligations to his ancestors and polity, so that the imbongi must be interpreted as a defender of the interests of the community as a whole.
The imbongi may expand the ambit of his poetry considerably. He may, for instance, choose to declaim on the subject not of a person but of an event or a practice of considerable importance and comment on its significance to the gathering and the wider polity. For example, Melikaya Mbutuma, a contemporary of Manisi’s, performed a series of poems at a public health meeting in 1976 extolling the value of good agricultural practices as well as of the breakfast cereal Pronutro, which he praised for the range of nutrients it could provide to the poor. His poems for the occasion, transcriptions of which are held in the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, included wide-ranging references to the audience, to the educators at the meeting, and to the various agents – including corrupt chiefs and government policies – responsible for the poverty and hunger that had caused the desperate need for such a gathering. Despite the usefulness of the idea of the imbongi as a mediator, the activity of izibongo is in fact far more energetic and multi-directional, concerned with igniting the heart and alighting on the imagination with multiple suggestions of connection. All izibongo, including urban variants, spark with varied focus and address: in one performance the imbongi might call on leaders, ancestors, audience, broader polity, historical communities, imagined gatherings, foreign nations, star constellations, and God. The purpose is for any single addressee to see her/himself suddenly in one, and then another, and still another circle of identity, obligation and belonging so that something of the potential of community can be communicated and affirmed in the space of the poet’s performance. Karin Barber suggests very richly the operation of the realm of the potential in praise poetry when she writes that praise poems construct ‘paths that are kept open to allow the flow of beneficence between beings’ (1991: 290).
One of the most important effects of the kind of address that defines praise poetry lies in the audience’s re-imagination of itself in terms of historical and potential identities, as well as in relation to other communities. It is this facet of the form that gives it both its affirmative potentials and its transformative capacities. Rather than simply hinging on a contextual model of polity, then, praise poetry is defined by its intrinsically imaginative mode of plural address, and it is this mode of address that gives the form its applicability in altered circumstances. Anxieties about the future of praise poetry, expressed by eminent scholars in the field such as Archie