Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
The actual mechanisms of chiefly rule under apartheid were thus apartheid inventions rather than revivals of established custom. But just as ‘ “[t]raditionality” had been a means of legitimating a racially discriminatory system, it now became a resource used by those Africans who stood to benefit from the apartheid system’ (Spiegel & Boonzaier 1988: 50). It is this co-operation between government and government-appointed chiefs, both claiming the authority of ‘tradition’, that enraged and diminished praise poets like Manisi and his contemporary, Melikaya Mbutuma. The ideal of a chieftaincy mandated by and responsible to the rural polity existed in abstraction, at considerable distance from quotidian experience in rural areas. Manisi’s efforts to articulate the values inherent in fair and ‘traditional’ chieftaincy were not only policed for their compliance with the prescribed apartheid interpretation of such terms, but were also burdened by apartheid’s appropriation of the institution of chieftaincy and the discourses of ‘tradition’, ‘tribe’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’.
Pretoria’s strategy of granting independence to homelands enabled the apartheid vocabulary to absorb yet another term of resistance: ‘decolonisation’. Government argued that in ‘returning’ land to black ‘nations’ it was participating in the process of returning to Africans what colonials had removed from them. Manisi’s focus on colonial occupation, and his repeated calls for the return of land and institutions of self-rule that belong to the Xhosa by right and tradition, have force and validity when received on their own terms and in historical perspective. However, the rural poet’s speech was vulnerable to the agenda of the dominant discourse of apartheid rule in two ways: first, it used the categories of identity and legitimacy that had been appropriated by Pretoria, and second, because the rural poet communicated these identities in his African mother tongue, his speech appeared to support apartheid’s invention of language-based ‘ethnicity’.
African nationalist and Africanist discourses
The 1940s and 1950s were formative years both in Manisi’s life and in the history of the black struggle against segregation and apartheid. In the 1940s, a group of young nationalists, among them Mandela, formed the Congress Youth League (CYL) and began to influence the ANC leadership. Initially avowedly Africanist in their thinking, by the early 1950s Youth Leaguers had modified their position to accommodate class-based analysis. In publicising the Defiance Campaign,11 the Youth Leaguers employed some Africanist rhetoric: a Johannesburg CYL spokesman, for example, addressed his audience as ‘you who are young and whose blood is hot’ and urged them to ‘catch the bull by its horns, Afrika’ (in Lodge 1983: 44). Most of the Defiance Campaign discourse, however, related to ‘sacrifice, martyrdom [and] the triumph of justice and truth’ (in Lodge 1983: 44).
In the eastern Cape, more people were arrested as a consequence of their involvement in the Defiance Campaign than in all the other provinces combined: 5 941 out of a national total of 8 326, according to the historian Tom Lodge (1983: 46). Lodge argues that support for the ANC was so sizeable in that province for several reasons, including ‘the ethnic homogeneity of the local population; the deep historical roots of modern political culture’ (1983: 46–47), and the persistence of strong anti-colonialism among people descended from the protagonists of first contact with Europeans. Manisi was typical of the ANC’s eastern Cape supporters in his sense of the history that supplied the black cause with moral legitimacy. The ANC’s rhetoric, especially in the 1950s, was conciliatory and sought to influence a segment of the white population by stressing the moral importance of the black experience. A conciliatory attitude and vision is evident in much of Manisi’s poetry, but also present in the poet’s historical emphasis is his dissatisfaction with the compromises attendant on negotiation and multicultural cohabitation. Manisi’s Africanist discourse bears similarities to that of the dissident Congress Africanists who in the 1950s abandoned the ANC to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The PAC’s vision, Lodge argues, can be traced back ‘to an essentially peasant outlook’ (1983: 83). For the PAC, the issue of the land and its return to black people was central. Pan-Africanists regarded South Africa as a colonial country that had to be retrieved on the battleground of race, rather than class, by Africans alone. Ethnic nationalism was their tool of resistance, and was to be the means by which South Africa took up its part in Africa’s common destiny.
The banning of African political parties in 1960, and the occurrence of the Sharpeville and Langa massacres in the same year, changed the political direction of black activism from protest to armed insurgency. The armed wings of the ANC and PAC engaged in sabotage attacks against strategic white targets. Poqo, the PAC militia, was the more violent actor and trafficked in the rhetoric of masculinity and anti-colonialism that frequently appears in Manisi’s izibongo. This is not to suggest, however, that Manisi was a PAC supporter, but rather that his poetry spoke in a plural discourse, aspects of which were popularised in the armed struggle in support of very different ideologies from those Manisi espoused. Indeed, Poqo condemned chiefs, and was anti-religious and highly authoritarian in the regions of its influence. Manisi, by contrast, followed the ANC discourses of Christianity and democracy but, unlike the ANC or the PAC, he also supported the ideal of chieftaincy and rejected violence in favour of negotiation. Lodge’s account of black politics in apartheid South Africa suggests that, while organisations like the ANC often tried to harness and organise rural action, most rural resistance was highly localised. According to Colin Bundy, ‘[l]ocal and particularist “traditional” or “inherent” ideological currents flowed with – and sometimes flowed against – broader, more “structured” or “derived” beliefs and aims’ (1987: 255). Bundy’s account of rural protest in Transkei between 1920 and 1960 argues that the struggles of rural communities ‘were not, of course, waged by “pure” peasant movements: there was a significant interplay between rural grievances shaping local resistance and the efforts of political organisations centred elsewhere to articulate, link and broaden these struggles’ (1987: 255). Manisi’s poetry, although it was concerned with the national question, was in part a localised response to the conditions of life in rural Transkei.
The poet’s focus on equal education, for example, stems both from the crucial role learning had played in eastern Cape history, and from Manisi’s outrage at apartheid’s institution of Bantu Education in 1953, which brought into being a parallel and inferior system of education for ‘non-whites’. The Xhosa were the first black South Africans to receive mission education, and qualification for the limited franchise that was granted until 1936 to a minority of black people under the Cape liberal system depended in part on education. As Chapter 1 details, many of Manisi’s literary predecessors received education of a high standard at Lovedale, and black inhabitants of the eastern Cape saw education as a primary means of social mobility. Lodge details the extent of the resistance shown by the Cape Teachers’ Association against Bantu Education, and argues that ‘teachers in rural communities during the 1950s were potentially the natural leaders of opposition to authority … it is no coincidence that the Bantu Education boycott movement [of 1955] had its most significant rural impact in the eastern Cape and adjoining reserves’ where a premium had long been placed on education (1983: 119). Resistance to the government’s Bantu Education scheme was widespread and, after the 1976 Soweto uprisings in which student marches were brutally put down by police, changed the course of black politics in South Africa. But Manisi’s account of education, while it coincides with the national struggle against Bantu Education and is itself partly a response to Bantu Education, is best understood in the context of the historical Xhosa relationship to mission schooling. It is this context that explains something of the poet’s faith in proper education, and his repeated appeals to educated white benefactors to reform the education system. Manisi’s concern with education echoes the old African elite’s efforts to reform South Africa from within. Urban struggles led by students and pupils were more revolutionary in nature.
The university student uprisings of the 1970s were influenced by the rise of the new, urban-based rhetoric of Black Consciousness (BC), which ‘washed over the boundaries of purely political concerns to infuse the patois of African petty-bourgeois culture with a fresh bitter assertiveness’ (Lodge 1983: 324). BC discourse revitalised township literature in the 1970s and demarcated the boundaries of an acceptable and authoritative language of resistance: although this