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Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa
... In Africa, poetry was largely oral and almost invariably synonymous with songs, chants and declamations. Some of the earliest scholars such as Jordan (1971) and Hegel (1975) simply dismissed this poetry as mere songs and chants. They considered it not qualifying to be classified as poetry, insisting that there was nothing of authentic poetic merit in African oral literature. ...
... The poem may be partly narrative or wholly descriptive. Praise poetry abounds in epithets, very much like the Homeric ones, and generally, the language is highly figurative (Jordan, 1971). ...
Poetry is the most basic and profuse form of emotive expression in Africa. The African manifests feelings through an outburst of song or poem when he loves and when he hates, when he works and when he plays, when he is in peace and when he fights, when the child is born and when death takes its toll. Poetry should be understood as a part of ongoing sets of aesthetic traditions, acts of distinction, and values. These are recognizable genres of expression (in either the ways they actively align, reject, or refigure received traditions of use).This study is an analysis of thematic distribution and poetic features in isiZulu performance poetry and also seeks to explore its socio-linguistic impact in the society. An ethnographic methodological approach was employed in this study. Data collection involved use of interviews, voice recordings and observations of the performance sessions. This is informed by two complimentary theories that served as the theoretical framework. Firstly Bourne (2001) and Tolstoy’s (2001) expressive theory of arts was used as a background theory to provide benchmarks to the understanding of the main aim and appreciation of performance poetry. Secondly, the study used Hyme’s (1981) ethnopoetic theory, where ethnopoetics is concerned with composition in the course of performance. Ethnopoetics is the study of the ways that narratives are structured into “lines” and are thus poetic (Hymes, 1981). The findings demonstrate that most of the poems studied in this research dwelt much on the theme of love but without necessarily ignoring other issues such as women and child abuse, corruption and many other social ills. The researcher also discovered that isiZulu contemporary poetry employs unique linguistic elements in its expression of the diverse thematic issues. Code-mixing or code-switching and borrowing seem to be getting more attention in the composition of performance poems.
... The IsiXIT collection also includes some of the earliest publications of isiXhosa literature -texts which emerged from leading intellectuals of the same community as newspaper contributors. These texts have gone on to be cultural touchstones of isiXhosa literature (Jordan, 1973). The books in this collection currently include Zemk'inkomo Magwalandini, a collection of praise poems and other writings, edited by Mpilo Walter Benson Rubusana one of the most important cultural and political leaders of the early 20th century (Jordan, 1984). ...
This article offers an overview of the IsiXhosa Intellectual Traditions Digital Archive, which hosts digitized texts and images of early isiXhosa newspapers and books from 1870-1914. The archive offers new opportunities for a range of research across multiple fields, and responds to debates around the importance of African intellectual traditions and their indigenous language sources in generating African social sciences which is contextually relevant. We outline the content and context of these materials and offer qualitative and quantitative details with the aim of providing an overview for interested scholars and a reference for those using the archive.
... Like other African intellectuals of his era, Mqhayi's work has been embraced by scholars of literature, but has not been sufficiently engaged by other academic disciplines. In addition to his long-lauded excellence as a Xhosa poet and novelist (Jordan 1973;Qangule 1979;Kuse 1979;Saule 1996;Opland 1998Opland , 2007, Mqhayi was a scholar and theorist of social change under colonialism, working to develop new answers to engage Xhosa social life. ...
African intellectual traditions have much to offer social analysis, yet many historical African intellectuals remain obscured by history and peripheral to contemporary academic work. This paper turns to the writings of the prolific amaXhosa intellectual S.E.K. Mqhayi, exploring his social and political thought, and considering how his work can be taken as part of an African sociological tradition. Focusing on Mqhayi’s use of history and biography as both the method and site of social analysis, the paper shows how Mqhayi developed a powerful vantage point on social transformations in order to create knowledge for African people under colonialism. The piece closes with a consideration of how Mqhayi and other African intellectuals writing outside of the academy might be integrated into teaching and researching an African sociological tradition.
... We have also selected essays to reflect both continental African voices (Lize van Robbroeck and Natasha Distiller from South Africa, Fibian Kavulani Lukalo from Kenya, Sunday Enessi Ododo from Nigeria) and voices of Africans living in the diaspora (Boulou de B'beri-Cameroonian in Canada, Awad Ibrahim-Sudanese in the US, Ali Abdi-Somalian in Canada). In addition to these two principal sets of contributors, there are also diasporic Africans (used here in the albeit problematic loose sense that references black people outside the continent) and Africanists who are contributing to the development of African cultural studies and the former of this last two categories is represented by Glenn Jordan (an African American who is a long time resident in Wales) and his contribution to this themed issue (Jordan 1973). ...
Cultural Studies has evolved and continues to evolve primarily along regional lines. however uncomfortable this might be, the genie of British cultural studies cannot be returned to the bottle of history. Thus, national versions of cultural studies have arisen in a few African countries. This book engages two critical and seemingly contradictory tasks: i) to contribute to the development of cultural studies from the perspectives of African experiences and indigenous frames of reference; and ii) to examine these in terms of transnational trajectories of the field in ways that do not reduce them to one or other context. Much cultural studies remains concerned with Texts, often disconnected from their contexts. for the authors published here, The contexts include African philosophies, cosmologies and ontologies. It includes the writings of both residential natives and those who have re-located to the diaspora, a spread that opens conversations with international approaches that include and exclude African experiences and work. This anthology juxtaposes many different kinds of cultural studies done in different parts of the world as a means of creating a global dialogue around the signifier of 'Africa'.
This book was first published as a special issue of Cultural Studies
... In line with this Special Issue, I approach the newspaperand the newspaper columnas texts in their own right, as sites of discursive performance and invention rather than merely repositories of historical or literary gems. As such, the paper builds on the idea of the newspaper as an important incubator of literary expression in African contexts and adds emphasis to emergent readings of African newspapers as sites of stylistic and genre-based experimentation and innovation in which the boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary are frequently breached (Jordan 1973;Couzens 1974;Newell 2002Newell , 2013Barber 2012;Peterson 2012;Peterson, Hunter, and Newell 2016). In this regard, the column writing genreinherently unstable, malleable and idiosyncraticemerges as a very important and distinctive discursive, even literary, form in a tradition of African newspaper formats which are often not very "newsy;" in which information takes second place to social gossip, moral exhortation, philosophical reflection, literary criticism, aesthetic experimentation and political commentary. ...
In this article, I examine the popular satirical column “R. Roamer Esq.” written by R.R.R. Dhlomo which appeared in The Bantu World newspaper. The study seeks to reassemble the archive of African intellectual and political life by foregrounding a hidden history of print culture practices and traditions. I assert the historical importance of the newspaper column and the satirical gesture in South African letters and emphasise the significance of the modes of humour and irony as forms of political resistance. In directing attention to the rhetorical and performative aspects of South Africa’s protest history, the article expands on the political role of the African press in the aftermaths of colonialism in articulating new modes of agency, resistance and critique. In particular, Dhlomo’s satirical column is approached as a space of literary expression in which opposition to various aspects of 1930s South African society is articulated in elusive, indirect and coded ways. As such, I advocate a reading of South African literary history that goes beyond the published literary text, one which can accommodate the idiosyncratic form of the newspaper column. In this sense, the newspaper itself is re-imagined as an important site of linguistic and genre-based experimentation, invention and play.
... He writes "The dawn of literacy is to be associated first and foremost with the Glasgow Missionary Society" (Jordan 1973, 37). He continues to make a list of the periodicals, which began to appear, such as Ikwezi ("The Morning Star"), Indaba ("The News") and Isigidimi-sama-Xhosa ("The Xhosa Messenger"), which were publications used for reading and publishing ideas written by the early converts as well as the missionaries (Jordan 1973). Jordan's work illustrates clearly how the black press emerged directly out of the need for black people to assert themselves by writing content which was not censored and controlled by the missionary authorities. ...
One of the most contested aspects in South Africa’s historiography has been women’s involvement in the politics of resistance. The work of feminists in the 1970s and 1980s began to question the invisibility of women’s protest and presence in South Africa’s historiography. The pass protest of 1956 was seen as the dominant narrative of women’s involvement in protests. Other forms of political involvement were erased, and women were only represented as having staged a protest march against the pass laws. However, more evidence has emerged, which challenges the forms of political involvement by women—and more importantly, more is being done to unearth the names of the women—whose works have been ignored. This article explores the writings by charlotte Maxeke and Nontsizi Mgqwetho, as they appeared in the 1920s in Umteteli waBantu. Much has been written about charlotte Maxeke as a formidable leader in the early twentieth century, who founded the Bantu Women’s League, after returning from Wilberforce University as the first black woman to get a degree. Maxeke’s hypervisibility is contrasted with Nontsizi Mgqwetho’s obscurity. Both these women wrote about the politics of their times, directing much criticism at the South African Native National congress, which was founded in 1912, which excluded women from its membership at its inception. This article argues that their writings challenge the notion of black women as silent figures, who were not involved in the politics of the early twentieth century.
... Indigenous African languages may be grouped into three broad Ôsub-families', Nguni, Sotho and ÔOthers', which are closely related members of the South-Eastern Bantu linguistic family (Greenberg, 1970;Jordan, 1973). The Nguni sub-family includes IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, SiSwati and IsiNdebele, which share many broad grammatical features and word roots. ...
South Africa is a multi-lingual country with 11 official languages and a recent history where language was frequently used as a political instrument, notably in the urban areas. Although the cities were initially colonial foundations, as a consequence of rural–urban migration, the speakers of the various national languages have come into close contact with one another. However, as a result of the inheritance of apartheid town planning and its emphasis on racial zoning, residential segregation levels between some linguistic groups have been extremely high. An analysis of the 1996 census results reveals that the uniformly high segregation levels between the speakers of indigenous African languages and the speakers of Afrikaans and English are the direct outcome of apartheid era town planning. Nevertheless, segregation between the speakers of different African languages may also on occasion be relatively high where homeland political policies were pursued, although this was the exception rather than the rule. Similarly segregation between English and Afrikaans speakers was locally high where home language coincided with former racial classification. Few immediate significant changes are anticipated in the present patterns of linguistic segregation, as the inherited apartheid city structure is proving to be remarkably resistant to transformation.
... We have also selected essays to reflect both continental African voices (Lize van Robbroeck and Natasha Distiller from South Africa, Fibian Kavulani Lukalo from Kenya, Sunday Enessi Ododo from Nigeria) and voices of Africans living in the diaspora (Boulou de B'beri-Cameroonian in Canada, Awad Ibrahim-Sudanese in the US, Ali Abdi-Somalian in Canada). In addition to these two principal sets of contributors, there are also diasporic Africans (used here in the albeit problematic loose sense that references black people outside the continent) and Africanists who are contributing to the development of African cultural studies and the former of this last two categories is represented by Glenn Jordan (an African American who is a long time resident in Wales) and his contribution to this themed issue (Jordan 1973). ...
Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? explores the ways in which the imaginative reconstruction of post-apartheid South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has been produced from images of women that dismember their bodies and disremember their historical presence. From Krotoa-Eva and Sarah Bartmann to Nongqawuse and Winnie Mandela, author Meg Samuelson tackles the figurations of some of the most controversial and significant women in the making of modern South Africa. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist theory, and close textual readings of literary and cultural texts produced during the first decade of democracy, her analysis offers a provocative critique of the formation of nationalist and feminist collectivities. The book explores the constraints of subjection and the performative power of subjectivity, as well as the ways in which women have been able to form collectivities on new terms.
In Africa, the decolonisation of academic work requires that academics write in African languages (or bilingually in English/French/Portuguese and the vernacular) and engage with texts written in these languages. With this in mind, I have been researching the socially constructed meanings of the concept imfundo (education) as they are conveyed in early isiXhosa texts written in the late 1800s and early 1900s by African intellectuals. In this paper I focus on their socio-cultural context and the biographies of two writers, Gqoba and Mqhayi, and illustrate with examples how their experiences of their social world shaped their construction of the meanings of imfundo. The research is part of a larger project that investigates the meanings of key sociological concepts in isiXhosa over the past 150 years and contributes to the making of an African sociology.
The article considers the scope and purpose of the project, “Translating (South) African Literatures”, in relation to the early twentieth-century Xhosa writer, SEK Mqhayi, two of whose works have been translated into English in the project. Turning to the several prompts to reflection offered by the project, I evaluate Mqhayi's contribution to an ‘expanded' South African literary history. As does the project, my argument requires a return to the archive, in this case of Mqhayi's dual commitment to both Xhosa custom (‘Red') and colonial-Christian modernisation (‘School'). A brief comparison of Mqhayi's plain voice of ethical justice and, in the mid-1920s, the experimental modernism of his contemporary, William Plomer, raises the issue of an appropriate aesthetic in an expanded literary history, while I conclude with a key consideration in any translation project: the need for a ‘usable’ theory and practice of translation.
The Niger Delta struggle or problem is no longer news to the international community. It has become the preoccupation in the works of contemporary literate writers from the region. In fact, such works have even begot the name, literature of the Niger Delta; and there is much scholarship on the appreciation of these works. However, what has been missing is that scholars in the disciplines of folklore, literature and cultural anthropology have not given attention to the relationship between the struggle and the traditional verbal art forms of the region. Therefore, this paper explores a fairly long oral poem about the struggle, chanted by the Ịjọ praise-singer, Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that, in doing so, Chief Munamuna continues the tradition of the African bard who comments on the goings-on in his society; not just chanting the praises of chiefs and other important personalities. It concludes by noting that the Niger Delta problem becoming a tool in the hands of an oral artist adds a new dimension to the discourse on the Niger Delta struggle.
This paper has identified the conflict between modern life and urban civilization and a valued history by revealing the challenges of post-colonial identity which includes the relationship between personal and cultural identity and such issues as double consciousness and hybridity. This paper will examine how Mda in The Heart of Redness delves into the mythical past and its divide to deftly portray the current socioeconomic challenges posed to South African society. This paper shall adopt postcolonial theory.
Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term taken from Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s work on newspaper history, included the casual and irregular intermingling of social and personal news with all the other paper content. By sewing people and their activities into the fabric of the paper, Umteteli created a niche and identity for itself as constitutive of black sociality in which the constraints imposed by racial segregation no longer impeded upward social mobility. This playfulness and creativity contradict much of what is written about the paper, usually assessed for whether its political content was supportive or not of African nationalism. Also, through ongoing encouragement and exhortation to its readers, the paper drew readers into a status as co-producers, creating commonality through the relationship of readers to the paper where that commonality might not have existed otherwise.
This article analyses a number of poems produced by S.E.K. Mqhayi, a well-known writer of isiXhosa poetry whose work was published in a number of isiXhosa early newspapers. Mqhayi is also acknowledged as the first prominent isiXhosa writer, producing poetry and novels and being credited for initiating the transition from oral to written literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this article selected poems are analysed against the backdrop of gender relations among the amaXhosa. The article sets out to discover the way in which Mqhayi was able to depict and praise women and their contribution in early amaXhosa society.
The current questions in academia regarding Africanisation of knowledge emanate from a historical context, where focus is on Africans as subjects rather than masters in the production of knowledge. The question of how Europeans used indigenous African languages since their arrival in Africa to subjugate native populations shrewdly, has been the subject of debates on language for some time now. The extent of the subjugation was evident in the prescription, through grammar rules and linguistics, of how the languages of the indigenous population were to be written. In this article, I give firstly the historical context of the grammaticalness of isiXhosa oral form, as observed by missionaries; through their writings that document their early contact with amaXhosa. Secondly, I discuss the context of the development of isiXhosa and the prescriptiveness of the grammar rules adopted in describing the spoken form of the language. In the third section, I discuss the early isiXhosa-speaking literates and their writings that defied the newly prescribed grammar rules— by focusing on the works of Gqoba, who was editor of Isigidimi sama Xosa (The Kafir Express), a newspaper in which he also published his writings between 1873 and 1888. The conclusion is drawn that the early grammar rules and the subsequent linguistics study of isiXhosa did not reflect the spoken form of the language; but were rather designed in a way that made the missionaries learn the language easily, in order to communicate with amaXhosa—therefore, they developed it in a manner that served their own interests, and not the interest of the native population. Therefore, my thesis is that the study of the texts written by native speakers should serve as a primary base for Africans to move away from being subjects to being masters in the production of knowledge.
In 1996, the inclusion of sexual orientation in the anti-discrimination clause of South Africa's post-apartheid constitution aligned LGBT+ rights with the larger struggle against oppression and inequality. In this paper we focus on a small, rural town in the Eastern Cape, a town we call Forestville. How are LGBT+ identities made visible in this town? How do residents respond to the diverse sexualities they encounter? How do they talk about diversity (sexual and otherwise)? The data was collected in the context of a long-term ethnographic project, which looks at responses to diversity in non-metropolitan settings. Reconstructing local philosophies of hospitality and looking at affective-discursive practice, we argue that social life in Forestville shows traces of what Derrida (2000) calls ‘absolute hospitality’. There is a sense of welcome and inclusivity, but, unlike in Derrida's conception, this hospitality is deeply embedded in the speech act of asking, indeed in curiosity. At the same time, hospitality remains fragile; it is always on the border of exclusion and judgment. The article explores Mignolo's (2000) idea of ‘critical border thinking’ as a core episteme for Southern theory and puts academic philosophy and everyday knowledges into dialogue with one another.
What areas of social life do our existing social theories allow us to understand, and what areas of society
leave us baffled, unsettled and unable to respond? This paper will argue that we are in need of new
interpretive tools to allow us to understand the areas of our social world that have previously been
excluded from academic view by our colonial and apartheid history, and even by progressive liberal and
Marxist responses to apartheid. By first surveying the intellectual history of sociology’s emergence as a
discipline and its formations in South Africa, I will argue that we are unable to effectively think about
large areas of the African cultural and social world within our society.
In search of alternatives this paper will explore the work of the prolific early 20th c. intellectual, S.E.K.
Mqhayi. Mqhayi was a product of the complex social hybridity of his time, but oriented this hybridity
towards amaXhosa and African people. By looking at his various mediums of writing I will argue that
Mqhayi offers powerful insight into the complexities of the changing social world of his time and that his
methodologies—so different from those of academic sociology—give us powerful insights into an
African tradition which can revitalise contemporary social inquiry.
The paper explores the meaning of conversion for African Christians in South Africa by looking at some of the indigenous terms that have populated the Christian vocabulary. The paper focuses on terms like ukuguquka, ukukholwa, ibandla, ikholwa, igqobhoka, inkonzo, and inkolo. These terms are found among people who speak Nguni languages. It shows how they were used in pre-Christian context and traces their evolution in Christian contexts. Research conducted in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, St John's Apostolic Faith Mission, and Methodist Churches in Cape Town between 1997 and 2001 has indicated that conversion was not a simple religious process but involved diverse political, economic and social aspects. Conversion involved a transformation of an African Christian identity from the margins to the centre. It also involved extensive negotiation of what it means to be Christian through the translation of Christian content into an African idiom. The paper goes through various terms and how their original meanings were discarded for new ones.
Poetry is one of the most vibrant artistic forms for socio-economic and political reconstruction of society among the Tiv of North Central Nigeria. The poets fix themselves in the forefront of arousing and propagating cultural consciousness, exposing vices, extolling virtues and personalities with such attributes, mobilizing people for unity and development, ensuring progressive change, maintaining social order and cohesion, unmasking socio-economic contradictions of class and polity, expressing the unheard voices of the voiceless in society and charting out a direction for the future of society. By reflecting the jeers, fears, aspirations, visions and general character of the society, they occupy a popular place and position in the social structure of Tiv society and their poetry is reinvigorated, in the usual popular way, in the new sensibilities of the digital technology being they dynamic in thematic exploration, traditional or modern. This article presents an exploratory overview of Tiv poetry in its changing digital forms of "secondary orality" which not only preserve the material but transform its productive, aesthetic and performance bounds to unending digital spaces creating in the wake a new character, a special effect, a new transmitting and storage pattern and the commodification of an individual's creations. The paper finally locates digi-orature, this new way of interrogating oral poets and their creations, within the ambience of postmodernity capable of attracting audiences outside the Tiv linguistic and geographical space.
The first novel in the Xhosa language, USamson, written by the greatest figure in the history of Xhosa literature, S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875-1945), and published in 1907, is now lost. It was produced at a time when black people in South Africa were becoming bolder in their demand for human rights, forming independent black churches and political organizations. It appeared after a period of gestation for Xhosa literature in newspapers, at a time when missionaries were discussing the publication of books in Xhosa, but Mqhayi paid for its printing and organized its distribution. The novelette added details of setting and characterization to the biblical story to encourage the youth to gather behind black leaders who lacked support. Caught in the social tension between Xhosa and Mfengu, USamson was heavily criticized by I. W. Wauchope for departing from biblical narrative, but more generally defended by readers, who looked forward to the further publication of Xhosa literature in books.
Despite having written three novels in the first decade of the 20th century, Thomas Mofolo has been largely ignored by historians of literature. The story of the translations of his novels, from 1930 onwards is that of misconceptions and serious misunderstandings. The originality and the complexity of the works discouraged closer readings and they were reduced to simplistic models. This article shows that Traveller to the East and Chaka are not as disparate as they were seen to be at the time. Possible similarities between Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje are also explored. Truth and reconciliation are about reading Mofolo again, and celebrating his example as the first African novelist. Translation is a major step towards reconciliation.
I offer a retrospective on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa from the perspective of 2016, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what remain challenges, and how we may think of, or rethink, orality and performance studies in a present and future that are changing at almost inconceivable pace.
The beginnings of written literatures among the indigenous peoples of southern Africa are rooted in the nineteenth century, a period of intensive and extensive missionary activity in that region. As the word made visible, writing was ushered in by translations of Bible tracts, followed at a slower but steady pace, by the Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The writer most likely to be published was one who advocated the abandonment of indigenous customs and cultures and the acceptance of their rivals from the west. A typical and much quoted example is that of Thomas Mofolo’s Moeti oa Bochabela (Sesotho, 1907) (Traveller of the East), which described the premissionary Lesotho as a place steeped in darkness in which “people ate each other like the animals of the veld,” and was accepted with great enthusiasm by the Paris Evangelical Mission Society, while Chaka(Sesotho, 1925), a much superior work artistically, was kept from publication for a long time by the same missionary group because they did not like its message. Typically, in Moeti oa Bochabela, Mofolo created a protagonist, Fekisi, who rejects his people and their customs, and undertakes a journey similar to that of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Fekisi’s “escape” from his culture is replayed over and over as African-language writers simulate Bunyan’s hero, especially in the early missionary period. © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
This article sketches the contested history of Black respectability in South Africa from the early part of the nineteenth century until the post-1994 dispensation. It argues that the assumption by numbers of, in particular, mission converts of the outward trappings of respectable Christian life was a form of resistance to colonial rule which was at least as threatening to colonial order as armed incursion. Further, it claims that the exclusion of the respectable Black middle class from any position of power, or influence, under segregationist and, above all, apartheid governments drove this group into an opposition which was at once foreign to the nature of the amaRespectables and, equally, particularly dangerous to the regime.
While the concept of standardization is well-established in linguistics, de-standardization is a more recent addition to linguistic terminology. Draw-ing on historiographic and ethnographic data from isiXhosa, one of South Africa's indigenous languages, this paper reflects on both of these concepts. Standardization is discussed as a modernist grand narrative whose contin-ued application to linguistic thinking has outlived its usefulness, and stan-dard languages as such (hegemonoc, prescriptive, etc.) might be assigned to Beck's (2002) zombie categories of modernity. Discussing the example of brandy-talk in isiXhosa from the perspective of ethnographic lexicogra-phy (Silverstein 2006), the paper argues for a linguistic perspective which focuses on the articulation and reproduction of social meaning as a central mechanism in the formation of linguistic conventions or ways of speaking. It advocates a recognition of the practices of speakers as they draw on standard and non-standard forms, as well as their associated meanings and ideologies (first/second order indexicality), in positioning themselves as social beings with identities, histories, aspirations, and ideological stances in everyday talk. In practice, the study of language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone. But a paradoxical consequence of this general interest is that no other subject has fostered more absurd notions, more prejudices, more illusions and more fantasies … it is the primary task of the linguist to denounce them, and to eradicate them as completely as possible.
In this article, I describe and systematize the different answers to the question 'What is ubuntu?' that I have been able to identify among South Africans of African descent (SAADs). I show that it is possible to distinguish between two clusters of answers. The answers of the first cluster all define ubuntu as a moral quality of a person, while the answers of the second cluster all define ubuntu as a phenomenon (for instance a philosophy, an ethic, African humanism, or, a worldview) according to which persons are interconnected. The concept of a person is of central importance to all the answers of both clusters, which means that to understand these answers, it is decisive to raise the question of who counts as a person according to SAADs. I show that some SAADs define all Homo sapiens as persons, whereas oth-ers hold the view that only some Homo sapiens count as persons: only those who are black, only those who have been incorporated into personhood, or only those who behave in a morally acceptable manner. 1 I want to thank all the people from South Africa who have informed me about their understanding of ubuntu. Furthermore, I want to direct special thanks to the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, the Khulumani Support Group, Prince Velekhaya Shange from the Zulu Royal House, and Bodil Sandegaard for helping me to set up interviews. Thanks also to Steen Wackerhausen, Morten Raffnsøe-Møller, Aase Rieck Sørensen, Augustine Shutte, Birgitte B.N. Gade, Lenore Messick, and an anonymous referee. Your guidance and comments have been truly appreciated.
Since the colonial period, higher education in eastern and southern Africa has been narrow and utilitarian, contributing to both unemployment and the skills shortage. The article explores older, more comprehensive indigenous models of higher education in Africa and cautions against allowing narrow economic and political concerns to dictate educational policy.
On 31 October 1847, the John Williams, a ship of the London Missionary Society, left Gravesend for the Pacific Islands from whence it had come. Its cargo included five thousand Bibles and four thousand copies of The Pilgrim's Progress in Tahitian. Like other such mission ships, the John Williams had been funded by the pennies and shillings of Sunday school subscription and had become a huge media spectacle. It was but one of the many international propaganda exercises at which mission organizations so excelled.
This picture of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678 and 1684) at the center of an international web is an appropriate one. Written in the wake of the English Revolution, the book had rapidly been disseminated to Protestant Europe and North America. By the late 1700s, it had reached India and by the early 1800s, Africa. Yet, some one hundred years on, this avowedly international image of The Pilgrim's Progress had been turned inside out. From being a book of the world, it had become a book of England. Today, John Bunyan is remembered as a supremely English icon, and his most famous work is still studied as the progenitor of the English novel. Roger Sharrock, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, best exemplifies this pervasive trend of analysis. His introduction begins by acknowledging Bunyan's international presence, but this idea is then snapped off from the “real” Bunyan who is local, Puritan, and above all English.
This is a study of letter writing amongst migrant workers on the Witwatersrand before World War II. It moves from a consideration of the paradoxical character of literacy amongst migrant mineworkers to a discussion about the history of privacy in South Africa. The paper suggests that both the field of popular culture and the politics of democracy can be better understood by paying attention to the particular forms of letter correspondence that have developed in 20th century South Africa.
The South African literary institution is engaged in an examination of both its role in the history of apartheid and its potential futures. Originating in Edward Said's search for an alternative to a “politics of blame”, this article considers recent attempts to explore the possibility of “secular interpretation” in (and of) the South African context. Leon de Kock's trope of “the seam” and Mark Sanders's notion of “complicity” are considered. We characterise both as postdialectical descriptions of the interconnections that define South African (multivalent) being and mark its inscription. Further, we suggest that their postdialectical turn, despite the authors’ primary concern with the history of identity and historiography, advocates a persuasive mode of scholarship for engaging contemporary South African identity.Leaving the domain of scholarly debate, we turn to a literary representation of the contemporary South African intellectual. We look at the figure of Camagu in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000) in the belief that he, caught as he is between contending cults of interpretation, embodies something of the practice of secular critique sought by Said, De Kock, and Sanders. Through Camagu, we maintain, it is possible for us to describe aspects of the dilemma of the “post‐anti‐apartheid” intellectual as well as the potential of a nondialectical engagement with both our past and our present.
What could fiction and cultural debate bring to readers of the magazine Africa South? In the late 1950s this magazine published political, economic, legal and other analyses of social life in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as polemics and journalism by writers variously but militantly opposed to the apartheid government’s policies in South Africa. The purpose of its editor, Ronald Segal, was to foster a broad front of opposition to racism at home and to connect with international intellectual movements opposing colonialism and racism. This article argues from Bakhtin’s observations about the radical instability of the sign in fiction, that fiction requires a different kind of reading from factual report. It demonstrates how the short stories in Africa South could enjoin on readers a conscious responsibility for sense-making and interpretation. This awareness created a questioning relation to text and thence to external realities that was in itself fundamentally oppositional and hospitable to the subject of socio-political change, for which the magazine as a whole argued. The writers considered here include both the famous and the forgotten: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Alan Paton, Tony O’Dowd and Noel Frieslich. Attention is on the semiotics of reading rather than on the contents of the short stories discussed. Because expectations of fiction change with the times, my question is necessarily an historical one. The article goes on to compare the climate of the 1950s with that of the more revolutionary 1980s, and with the present. For the present era Njabulo S Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela stands as a possibly representative text.
In enacting his ritual of kingship, the Xhosa imbongi (praise poet) in South Africa is marked by his accoutrements and his artistic performance as separated from society; he assumes a sacred stance in a transitional position and effects the social incorporation of his audiences; he mediates between chief and subjects, serving as both upholder of the chief's status and as social critic. His liminal location invites comparison with other trickster figures of African mythology and folklore like Ananse and Legba. This perspective explains the occasional self-belittling assertions by the imbongi, as well as the imbongi's license to criticize and use ribald language with impunity.
The article suggests a paradigm for the historiographical understanding of the several culturally distinct but interrelated literatures of southern Africa. Instead of regarding the literatures as discrete linguistic‐ethnic entities, the comparative approach contextualised within the functioning of society questions conventional boundaries of language, race and genre. In seeking to delineate a “single story”, translation refers broadly to the activity of making the insights of one culture accessible to the other, the aim being to respect difference while identifying points of common concern in a democratic enterprise.
In South Africa’s Eastern Cape frontier zone, a millenarian movement known as the Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1856–1857) devastated local populations and stunned observers. How could the messages of its prophetess, Nongqawuse, and the exhortations of her uncle, Mhlakaza, lead to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle, to the death of tens of thousands of people, and to the subjugation of the Xhosa? Historians and authors of literary works have attempted to answer this question, and their explanations have followed the contours of South African history through three general phases. The first (1857–1947) characterized the movement as a failed revolt against British expansion and a necessary step in social and religious Darwinism. The second period (1948–1988) saw the continuation of these interpretations, and, with National Party rule and the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, an increasingly radical group of historians brought about politicized and alternative interpretations embedded in Xhosa oral history. The third phase (1989–) began with the publication of Jeff Peires’The Dead Will Arise, which renewed interest in the history and has inspired a new wave of historical critique.
This article makes use of the notion of cultural hybridity as developed by Homi Bhabha in order to come to terms with the ways in which specific writers in 20th-century South Africa incorporated Shakespeare as an icon and as a collection of texts into their work. I explore how the parameters of, particularly, gender and class impact on the identity positions that are both enabled by and developed in defiance of colonial and apartheid knowledge systems and institutions. In this context, extracts from the work of Solomon Plaatje and William Bloke Modisane are briefly discussed. Shakespeare's putative universalism is invoked by both these writers who, positioned at different points in South Africa's pre-democratic history, make use of the texts, and the cultural and humanist associations that accrue to “Shakespeare.” The hybrid textual inscriptions that result need to be understood in terms of the local conditions of production, the subject positions they in part enabled, and the changing socio-political climate which made its own demands on the writers who had access to Shakespeare. I locate this discussion within a post-colonial framework in order to unravel some of the cultural complexities at work in the presence of Shakespeare in 20th-century South African literature, and the connections with specific political and social conditions.
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