Stranger at Home. Ashlee Neser
and as instruments of hegemonic control or sites of repression on the other. Cultural analysis under apartheid tended to be a sharply focused assessment of the extent to which each text or artefact promoted or retarded the liberation struggle. (2001: 178)
Just as urban, popular forms largely repudiated rural politics and terms of address because they had been appropriated by apartheid discourse, so literary studies often treated traditional forms as irrelevant or even detrimental to the liberation cause. More broadly, in some influential postcolonial theory like that produced by Homi Bhabha, traditionalism is figured as being uncritically patriotic and atavistic. Given credibility, Bhabha argues, ‘its language of archaic belonging marginalises the present’ (1990: 317). Now that there is space for broader investigations than those allowed by the demands of the struggle period, the ‘traditional’ is threatened with fresh forms of reification, such as the tourist industry’s marketing strategy of selling ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ vacation geographies to local and foreign holidaymakers. Cultural critic and creative writer Ari Sitas expressed his concern in a 1986 interview that in this environment praise poetry is subject to simultaneous canonisation and reification. Liz Gunner summarises the argument: ‘It is marginalized in the sense that it has lost its proactive role and its involvement in the making of a nation,’ but equally, it is being canonised ‘because it is seen as an important ingredient of what is perceived as exportable to the outside world as “South African culture”. So the praise poet – like biltong and the protea – is part of the South African identity package’ (1999: 58).
However, there are other contemporary engagements with the ‘traditional’ that give impetus to this book. Post-apartheid legislation on traditional leadership and governance, for example, sets out the roles and powers of chiefs in contemporary South Africa, and reflects state acknowledgement of the significance to the national paradigm of rural politics. And indicated earlier, several literary projects of the last decade such as those by Gunner and Gwala (1991), Chapman (1996) and Brown (1998), as well as public performances and popular publications that have been raising questions about rural and traditional influences, all make space for renewed evaluations of specific examples of the ‘traditional’. I focus on the work of Chapman, Brown and Gunner because the directions they provide reflect their productive institutional orientation as scholars who have been located in literary departments with strong interests in oral studies. If we are to take seriously oral forms and rural artists, we must work to overcome not only how we think about the urban and the rural, the traditional and the popular, but also how we get past the unusually and unproductively fierce division of expertise and subject matter between literary studies and the broader constellation of anthropologists, linguists, African language disciplines and historians that comprise oral studies in South Africa. In international oral studies circles there has long been a call for an interdisciplinary approach to performance texts (I am thinking particularly of Karin Barber and Paolo de Moraes Farias in their important 1989 edited collection of papers). But in South Africa the separation of disciplines has been particularly severe, in line with the kinds of political polarities I have been discussing.
This book deals with the poetry of one oral poet. Whereas literary studies has traditionally seen value in careful attention to the individual artist, studies of oral texts have tended to produce explanations of genres, forms and their modes of operation in society. The ascendancy of ethnographic, anthropological and sociological influences is evident in this approach. The relatively small sub-field of Xhosa oral poetry has been dominated by Opland’s main studies, Xhosa Oral Poetry (1983) and Xhosa Poets and Poetry (1998). Russell Kaschula’s The Bones of the Ancestors are Shaking: Xhosa Oral Poetry in Context (2002) focused on post-apartheid izibongo. These books investigate the practice and purpose of Xhosa oral forms as a whole from the vantage point of original fieldwork. The products of the fieldwork are sometimes published, such as in Kaschula’s (2002) collection of Bongani Sitole’s izibongo, or they get lodged in libraries as archival material, much of which falls immediately silent.
While literary critics are no doubt overly conscious of the life of print, they can contribute usefully to oral studies by considering the potentials of transcriptions. Brown, for example, argues for maintaining the dialectic between a text’s ‘past significance’ and its ‘present meaning’ (1998: 2) – a strategy that commonly informs literary reading practices. In the context of an oral text, this dialectic involves interpreting performance as a phenomenon that acted in specific circumstances of production and reception and that accrues a new life and textuality, a new ontology, in print. In transcription, recorded texts address new publics and speak in ways that bear traces, sometimes entirely obscure to later receivers, of their oral context but they are also open to negotiation in their new circumstances of reception. It is this alternative world of interpretation for which Manisi hoped in his book writing and in his agreement to the recording of his poetry for academic analysis.
There is a danger, however, in focusing questions about textuality solely on the categories of performance, transcription and linguistic translation. Even in the paradigm of performance, oral poems operate in fundamentally different ways depending on the conditions of their production and reception. In his 1964 guide for fieldworkers, the ethnographer Kenneth Goldstein suggested differences between natural contexts of performance in which artists address their ‘normal’ audiences, and degrees of artificiality in context where academics intervene to record or even precipitate circumstances for the production and recording of texts. Ruth Finnegan proposes a more subtle account of the academic effect on context by interrogating the category of the ‘natural’: she argues that all social events and performances are constructed, and that tacit claims by researchers about their access to ‘natural’ contexts elide important questions about the intrusion of the fieldworker. She concludes, however, that ‘there are clearly degrees of artificiality’ (Finnegan 1992: 77). To take examples from Manisi’s archive, there are significant differences between those poems performed for Opland at the scholar’s request, those performed at political events at which Opland just happened to be present, and those performed in the course of joint teaching projects. These differences relate to questions about audience composition and capacity for understanding, performance purpose and, crucially, what modes of address are available to the poet. The nature of an oral text – that is, what it sets out to do and be, and with what degree of capacity, reflexivity or impediment – depends on many factors beyond the impact of the researcher alone.
In the chapters which follow, I examine how Manisi tried to deploy the praise poem in a variety of contexts, all of them in different ways deeply inhospitable to free communication. I will try to show as comprehensively as possible that, despite many and constant obstacles, he always sought to communicate with his audiences rather than merely to exhibit his literary form or demonstrate his skill at improvisation. As well as focusing on the terms of address used by the poet to craft his appeals to his audiences, I will also look closely at the ways in which Manisi and Opland described and understood the project they undertook together and the texts that their long association produced and archived. I hope that my study suggests the enormous value of the productive and sustained collaboration between a talented poet and a committed scholar at the same time that it takes a critical, but not a judgemental, approach to some of the ways in which that collaboration has framed and fixed Manisi’s body of poetry. Opland tries to be aware of the pitfalls of writing about and interpreting the literary output and life of a man with whom he had so long and so close an association but who was at the same time a primary subject of his academic work. In his memoir of his relationship with Manisi, he suggests how acutely he recognises the many constraints placed upon his association with Manisi by the pair’s instantiation of the racial and economic inequities sustained by apartheid. There is much to be written into South Africa’s literary history – about how certain spheres of cultural production happened and what kinds of texts and bodies of texts such processes made – through the study of similar collaborative enterprises.
Perhaps the most sustained critique I make in this book pertains to the categories that Opland and Manisi applied to Manisi’s izibongo: they do not adequately illuminate the poems’ different textualities, nor do they account for the pressures on those texts of their broad socio-political contexts of production. Based on the kinds of explanations and cautions provided by Goldstein and others, Opland and Manisi distinguished between ‘performances’ and ‘demonstrations’