Nations's Bounty. Nontsizi Mgqwetho
prose introduction to poem 97, Akazange ukuxelelena u Ntsikana ukuba uze uqwalasele i Bhaibhile? Wazuka wena wayiyeka, wayiqwalaselelwa ngabelungu; andigxeki mlungu ke ngakuba nditsho: kodwa ke xa kutiwa: “Funa wawuya kufumana,” akutshiwo ke ukutiwa mawufunelwe ngomnye umntu, “Didn’t Ntsikana tell you to study the scriptures? And you left the whites to study them for you. I’m not mocking the white when I say that. But when it’s written ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ it doesn’t mean that someone else must do the finding for you.” Nor does acceptance of this truth necessarily entail a rejection of the truth inherent in traditional Xhosa custom:
Inyaniso masipatwe ngananinye
Inyaniso kungaviwa bantu banye
Nantso ke! Inyaniso yezi Bhalo
Napantsi ke, kweyetu imibhalo.
The truth must be treated fairly,
the truth must be heard by both sides:
the truth is there in the scriptures
and also within our blankets. (40: 21-24)
Gaitskell alludes to a process characteristic of the manyanos: “the moulding and significant transformation and appropriation of Christianity as it was embodied in southern African communities” (1995: 226). Nontsizi bears considerable reverence not only for biblical texts but also for the sayings of the revered Xhosa prophet Ntsikana, transmitted through oral tradition (see poem 43, for example). She draws into her poetry scriptural references and quotations as well as the words and prophetic sayings of Ntsikana: the unity of a tightly compacted ball of scrapings (imbumba yamanyama), for example, gathering together diverse sheep into one flock (Ulohlanganis’ imihlamb’ eyalanayo), Jesus as a hunting party hunting souls (Ulonq’ina izingela imipefumlo) or the flash of a portentous shooting star (Yabinza nenkwenkwezi isixelela). She consistently Africanises—and feminises—both Jehovah and Jesus.
If Nontsizi came to Johannesburg at the end of the First World War, she would have arrived in a time of considerable social unrest. The influenza epidemic of 1918 had hit urban blacks living in squalid conditions particularly hard, unions and pressure groups were mobilising and there was a series of strikes and anti-pass protests. In the wake of one of these strikes, the Chamber of Mines decided to launch a multilingual newspaper to counter the influence of Abantu-Batho. Brian Willan sketches the context. The idea for a new weekly newspaper published by the South African Chamber of Mines, he writes,
actually originated in 1919 with a request from a group of conservative African political leaders in the Transvaal—Saul Msane and Isaiah Bud-M’belle amongst them—for support from the Chamber of Mines for a newspaper which would provide an alternative voice to Abantu-Batho, the Congress newspaper which was controlled by the radical Transvaal branch of the movement. Their original approach was not successful, however, and the Chamber turned down their requests for support. But in the early months of 1920, following a massive black miners’ strike that February, the Chamber of Mines—more specifically, its Native Recruiting Corporation—decided to take the initiative in launching a newspaper with the objective, as they put it, of dispelling ‘certain erroneous ideas cherished by many natives and sedulously fostered by European and Native agitators, and by certain Native newspapers’. (Willan 251)
Willan also describes the political philosophy of the weekly paper which, he says, “throughout the 1920s appeared without a break (in contrast to Abantu-Bathowhich struggled desperately to keep afloat)”:
Whilst Umteteli was regarded by some Africans, and certainly by the South African Communist Party, as simply a tool of the mining industry, the line it took was a relatively liberal one. Its editorials advised against support for strike action as a means of redressing grievances, and precious little criticism of the mining industry ever appeared in its columns, but it did support the retention of the Cape franchise and its extension to the northern provinces; it opposed the Hertzog bills, and it was strongly against the colour bar in industry, and hence opposed the Mines and Works Amendment bill. For Umteteli the villains of the South African political stage were not, as the South African Communist Party would have it, the mining capitalists, but overpaid white workers who possessed the political means to force the government to concede their demands for a guaranteed place, protected by the colour bar, in industry; Afrikaner nationalists who demanded state handouts to subsidise inefficient farmers at the expense of the mining industry; and a Pact government that represented a cynical alliance of the two. (Willan 315-16)
All of Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s poetry appeared in the pages of Umteteli wa Bantu, The people’s messenger.
Her poetry is filled with images of sound: the wailing of women and Africa, the roar of thunder and rivers. Animals feature prominently too, the sheltering wing of a mother hen, the spots on a leopard, the stalking lion, the cow yielding only dribbles of milk and the hyenas that Christians turn into at night. Although she writes removed from her home country, her imagery is that of the countryside, rural rather than urban. Although she occasionally appropriates a masculine voice, her imagery is also very much that of a woman: she swears by Lady and refers to women’s petticoats and skirts and drums. Africa is clearly female, and Jesus wears a woman’s headdress. Her poetry is nearly a century old now, but it still impresses as refreshingly—and sadly—modern. However, readers might be puzzled by her repetitions: it is not just that phrases and even stanzas become formulaic, towards the end of the sequence the individual lines of entire poems can be matched elsewhere in her body of poetry. Is she guilty of creative laziness or fatigue? How much value can a poem have if it is a mere pastiche of phrases often used by the poet? The reader working through the sequence from beginning to end will surely be puzzled, alienated by what appears to be a lapse in originality, and might question the wisdom of an editor who includes poems that say nothing new in words that have become all too familiar. And this might be especially so when one of the translation principles is to translate repeated phrases and stanzas in exactly the same way.
My first response to such a charge would be that Nontsizi’s original audience would not have encountered these poems as a reader of this book will: at their most frequent, they appeared weekly, in an ephemeral medium designed to be discarded. Nine years separates the first poem from the last in the sequence, over which course of time even the most loyal fans of her poetry might not be troubled by the repetitions. Nontsizi might have kept copies of her published poems, which she ransacked from time to time; but these repeated words and phrases could also have stuck in her memory, and come to mind as appropriate as she wrote. Her readers would have been attuned to the izibongo of the imbongi, in which such repetition is commonplace. The imbongi has at his disposal a battery of formulas, words and phrases he has used of his chief, or words and phrases that he has heard other poets using of their chiefs, expressions of his own composition as well as expressions common to the tradition. As the imbongi S.M. Burns-Ncamashe said to me on 9 July 1971, when I asked him about the poet’s retention of memorised lines,
Well, in some cases they would repeat more or less the same phrases, but with new phrases each time, because usually izibongo do include a description of the appearance of a person or a thing, and naturally, since the appearance doesn’t change, you’d always refer to a man with that long nose or thin legs and so forth—he’d still have them, you know, a big tummy and so forth. So, in addition to the appearance, then there would be the events that may have taken place which would be included naturally in the subject of the izibongo. (Opland 1998: 49)
Members of a rural imbongi’s regular audience would not be troubled by such repetitions, they would actually welcome them, with the pleasurable recognition of the familiar.
All of Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s Xhosa contributions to Umteteli are included here, even when an item such as poem 98 is mainly a pastiche of earlier phrases and stanzas, or when poem 99 is wholly made up of repeated expressions. On the one hand, her prose preambles to the poems become more and more developed towards the end of the series, and they merit inclusion. Then again, the reader should learn to accept and absorb the repeated phrases, and use them, as an informed audience of a sequence of oral performances would. Formulaic passages are often highly suggestive,