Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
a black everyman who represented the combined African, Indian and coloured South African community. Reference to ethnic difference was not legitimate. Catchphrases in the slick, tough lexicon of urban-speak distinguished BC discourse as a language of the township and the city. As Lodge perceptively notes, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) represents ‘the coming of age, despite the institutions of apartheid, of a new African petty bourgeoisie’ (1983: 325).
In a paper about the progression in black South African thought from identity grounded in liberation to identity based on citizenship, CRD Halisi remarks that BC philosophy, ‘by providing an alternative to psychological complicity with racial oppression, could expedite the subjective prerequisites needed for black liberation’ (1997: 75). Urban black nationalists, whether they were ‘multiracial unionists’ or ‘black republicans’, perceived the need to refuse ‘ethnic’ categories and stress black unity as a way of resisting apartheid. Despite his many sojourns to cities for work, Manisi was to remain a peasant poet who was strongly attached both to the national cause and to the rural, Xhosa polity. In his poetry, which deals in the complex intersections of belonging and identity, Manisi could not banish ‘ethnicity’ or ‘tribe’ from his lexicon. This does not mean that his poetry was intentionally divisive: he exhorted black unity as fervently as urban black nationalists did. But the rural imbongi of the chiefdom, whose literary heritage and terms of address were compromised by their association with the institutions and discourses that apartheid had co-opted, was a tainted creature in the eyes of his urban counterparts.
Recent revaluations
Focusing on the archival traces of Manisi’s public career, this book is a response to several suggestions made by post-apartheid texts that have sought to revalue marginalised literatures and revitalise the discourses of identity in South Africa. In his challenging and controversial study, Southern African Literatures, literary historian Michael Chapman argues for the centrality of the praise poem in a revised southern African literary history. He argues that while the form is concerned with questions of power, it is also ‘about the insecurities and mobilities of change’ (Chapman 1996: 55), and that these latter subjects give us ways of ‘reading’ praise poems in contexts of struggle and transformation. Like Chapman, the literary scholar Duncan Brown (1998) investigates the way in which praise poems speak to present contexts even when they deal with historical relationships or when, as in the Zulu tradition, they are memorised sets of praises redeployed in contemporary circumstances. Both Chapman and Brown focus on memorial traditions of poetry and perhaps pay overmuch attention to famous historical poems, like Shaka’s izibongo, at the expense of more recent performance careers. Nevertheless, these writers urge us to expand the study of praise poetry in the broad national literary domain so that South Africa’s many literatures can be understood in relation to one another and to the social context as a whole. They argue more generally that the researcher has a duty to social justice, and that recuperative studies of neglected works, which might be valued for their alternative perspectives and modes of speaking, constitute valuable ways of promoting intercultural understanding. More recently, studies such as Chris Thurman’s (2010) book about the influential but not unproblematic South African poet and literary critic, Guy Butler, suggest new possibilities for the paradigm in terms of which one might reconsider a literary career and its relation to its era. Rather than working from the heady notion so dominant immediately post-apartheid that criticism ought to recuperate neglected work, later writers consider their task to be one of reassessment, an orientation that takes for granted a far broader literary history and textual field.
Two popular texts have encouraged this study with their discussion of praise poetry in relation to questions about belonging and self in contemporary South Africa. The first and principal of these is Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), in which the author recalls two performances of izibongo that remained in his memory and shaped his ideas about national and ethnic identities. His first experience of praise poetry was when the famous Xhosa imbongi, SEK Mqhayi, performed at his school. Mandela describes his confused but powerful reaction to the intersecting identities articulated and endorsed by the great poet:
I did not want ever to stop applauding. I felt such intense pride at that point, not as an African, but as a Xhosa … I was galvanised, but also confused by Mqhayi’s performance. He had moved from a more nationalistic, all-encompassing theme of African unity to a more parochial one addressed to the Xhosa people, of whom he was one … In a sense, Mqhayi’s shift in focus mirrored my own mind because I went back and forth between pride in myself as a Xhosa and a feeling of kinship with other Africans. (1994: 40)
What Mandela is struck by is the characteristic density and enigmatic nature of praise poetry. Later in the autobiography, he describes an occasion at which a Zulu imbongi recited Shaka’s izibongo for an audience of political prisoners in a Johannesburg penitentiary:
Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history, our culture, our country and our people … In that moment we felt the hand of the great past that made us what we are and the power of the great cause that linked us all together. (Mandela 1994: 189)
These extracts suggest the ways in which praise poetry inspires both narrow and broad allegiances.
Antjie Krog’s memoir, A Change of Tongue (2003), is concerned with how an Afrikaans poet and journalist can learn to live and write poetry as a member of a multiracial and democratic South Africa. Concerned with translation as a way of living in multicultural, multilingual societies, and seeking out the voices and wisdoms of rural places, Krog devotes considerable attention to the figure of the praise poet. She also recounts a seminar she attended at which the lecturer performed an English translation of Manisi’s 1954 poem for Mandela (Krog 2003). There is in this series of mediations – Krog’s transcription and use of a performed translation of a written praise poem presently unavailable to audiences in its original isiXhosa – much to ponder about Manisi’s efforts at entextualisation and textual preservation, as well as about how texts in fact survive or fail.
In his timeline of important South African literary moments, Chapman includes the publication of Manisi’s first book in 1952. Whereas Jeff Opland has written extensively about Manisi in relation to the field of Xhosa literature – a rich territory of oral and written texts that Opland has done more than any other critic to map, track, describe and animate with recorded or retrieved texts12 – my study is concerned with filling out Chapman’s abbreviated insertion of Manisi’s poetry into the national literature, as well as considering the impact of the broad context of his day on Manisi’s practice of his form. Oral poetry, and indeed this is true of Manisi’s output, is usually the provenance of scholars from departments of African languages. In his review of critical work on apartheid politics, Mamdani identifies a ghettoised body of scholarship concerned with chieftaincy and rural administration ‘whose findings and insights are seldom integrated into a comprehensive analysis of the state’ (1997: 28). Similarly, several influential anthropologists and historians have argued that the rural sphere has been misunderstood and marginalised in general South African histories to the detriment of a fuller understanding of the country’s intersecting communities and identities. Disciplinary domains in South Africa have tended to emulate these unfortunate divisions: oral and folklore studies in African language departments have focused largely on rural forms, and literary and cultural studies, as embodied, for example, in departments of English in South African universities, have given their energies to urban forms.
In literary and cultural studies, scholars have given considerable attention to popular forms, as Karin Barber (1987) urged them to do in her seminal study ‘Popular Arts in Africa’. Popular forms flourished in townships in response to apartheid rule, and literary departments have for some time researched and taught hybrid forms like Soweto poetry, Staffrider and Drum stories, as well as trade union praise poetry. But rural forms, even when they were performed for urban audiences as in Manisi’s career, were tainted for many literary critics by their ‘traditional’ status. In her review of Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael’s (2000) book about South African cultural studies, Barber summarises the historical attitudes of such disciplines:
Throughout