Nations's Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho
... Yesterday&Today, No. 21, July 2019 orientation based oppression (Dominguez, 2012;Mgqwetho, 2007;Mqhayi, 2017 Looking particularly at the South African academy, the word "decolonisation", if defined, remains useful, as does the literature from which it emerges, even as it is appropriated by a variety of sectors. I approach the idea of decolonisation from a broad dual position of Africanisation and feminist decoloniality. ...
... Or new. Poetry has been used to challenge colonisation, in printed form, for at least a century (Mgqwetho, 2007;Mqhayi, 2017). 19 The current wave of popularity of poetry can be useful in Teacher Education programmes, as well as in school classrooms, if combined with rigorous historical critical enquiry. ...
Poetry can present historical material in a non-academic format. This format may be particularly important for students who are excluded from epistemic access (Morrow, 2007). This exclusion stems from many things, but ways of writing, ways of framing history, and whose voices and stories are heard are part of this exclusion. This article explores using poetry as a method of decolonising history teaching, primarily in teacher training classroom contexts. Poetry provides a unique combination of orality, personal perspective, artistic license, and historical storytelling. The form can also draw students into a lesson. As a device somewhat removed from students' ideas about what history is, poetry is an alternative way of investigating ideas of "truth", evidence, narrative, and perspective. It provides an entry point to historical topics, that can be supplemented through other texts and forms of evidence. Poetry also provides a voicing for sensitive topics, acknowledges and embraces complexity and pain. It could also remove the teacher as mediator, even if only for a moment. Additionally, it can open space for marginalised voices and stories. By drawing from local poems, especially by black womxn poets, race and gender are centred in the conversation in a visceral way. International poets open conversations about globally linked histories. Poets from different generations raise questions of continuity and change. All poems are open to examination through historical thinking skills. This article explores the tensions in decolonising the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) history Further Education and Training (FET)(Senior High School) curriculum and in using a creative medium such as poetry to do so.
... In recent years Opland has published translations of this work, including from newspapers like Imvo Zabantsundu (Wauchope 2008;Gqoba 2015;Mqhayi 2017). Opland pays particular attention to Umteteli in his writing on the publication of poetry in Xhosa, as well as in his work on the female poet, Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Mgqwetho 2007). Brian Willan (1984) traces Sol Plaatje's writing and editorial work through a series of publications, beginning with Plaatje's own newspaper, Koranta e Becoana. ...
... But equally, the paper's readers would be reminded about the sagacity of those who led the Zulu in the days of their independence, letter writers commenting authoritatively about the way in which chiefs of old would have handled particular situations. Poetry, especially praise poetry with its double-faced wit, was a particularly skilful tool for poking the state (Opland 1998;Mgqwetho 2007). Historical figures, fictitious and real, spoke out on behalf of the contemporary and temporary voiceless. ...
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.
Published almost exclusively in the multilingual Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu during the 1920s, Nontsizi Mgqwetho's poetry is enmeshed with the racial and industrial politics of her time and place. Despite its denunciations of the colonial state and vehement calls for black unity and activism, her work is complicated by its publication in a newspaper sponsored by the Chamber of Mines. This article investigates Mgqwetho's forceful political poetry and its intersection with both the coercive, racist labor policies of her times and the discursive power of Umteteli Wa Bantu. It argues that in linking her religious and political convictions with the social anxieties of her times, Mgqwetho's work provided the ford through the era's turbulent political waters.
This book demonstrates the insights that literature brings to transdisciplinary urban studies, and particularly to the study of cities of the South. Starting from the claim staked by mining capital in the late nineteenth century and its production of extractive and segregated cities, it surveys over a century of writing in search of counterclaims through which the literature reimagines the city as a place of assembly and attachment. Focusing on how the South African city has been designed to funnel gold into the global economy and to service an enclaved minority, the study looks to the literary city to advance a contrary emphasis on community, conviviality and care. An accessible and informative introduction to literature of the South African city at significant historical junctures, this book will also be of great interest to scholars and students in urban studies and Global South studies.
This book tells the story of a remarkable achievement -- how poetry written by Black women in South Africa came to remake public space. It is the account of a profound transformation in national culture that emerged because Black women were exiled from the official worlds of poetry in academia and the dominant publishing world and even from places that they expected to be inclusive, such as post-apartheid writing conferences and workshops. From the margins, Black South African women forged a new infrastructure for poetic expression, through which they nurtured broad participation by those who longed to write but had no avenues to publication and reached audiences hungry for the vitality of poetry to articulate their realities. Such audiences would consequently follow these writers into arenas that official poetry did not touch.
This paper is a consideration of a limited number of social and creative imaginaries and their pivotal and difficult implications for trans-generational reflections, narratives and cultural memory in South Africa. The first part of the paper centres around the role-played by narrative. In black communities, the attempts to envision and elaborate alternative understandings of history were acts of knowledge production that negated imperial and colonial modernity and especially their politics of racial subjection and exclusion. The section concludes with a brief consideration of the hermeneutical challenges that are presented by conventional interpretive approaches to narrative and its political imperatives. Following the underscoring of why narrative matters, the second part of the paper maps out the persistent ways in which alienation is foregrounded as an important constituent of black-senses-of-being, especially in relation to the land, the means of life, kin, space and the social-formation. The discussion concludes with a consideration of some key challenges that the calls for transformation and decolonisation present for the processes of knowledge production, narration and interpretation.
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.
This essay surveys poetry by black South African women published since 2005 as a means of critically engaging the post-transitional literary paradigm. It notes the ways in which black women’s poetry has expanded from apartheid and transitionary modes of writing to include four broad categories: gender justice, the body, diasporic identity and re-memorying history. It argues that black women’s poetry that inhabits these four literary modes produces a restorative ethic, which seeks to restore and repair histories and subjectivites fractured by colonialism and apartheid.
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