Stranger at Home

Ashlee Neser

Description

Stranger at home is about the literary remains of one of South Africa’s most talented praise poets, David Manisi. It is about the deeply inhospitable context in which the poet endeavoured to communicate with his peers and, working with the scholar Jeff Opland, with future audiences he would not meet. Author of five volumes of Xhosa poetry and prodigious performer, Manisi saw himself as a man of multiple allegiances and locations at a time when these markers of self were rigidly policed. For a time the most famous poet in Kaiser Mathanzima’s court, Manisi also wrote the first published poem about a young Nelson Mandela. Despite these early auguries of fame, the poet’s career relocated substantially to the isolating environments of American and South African Universities.
Ashlee Neser examines Manisi as an inventive negotiator of rural and urban worlds, modernity and tradition, performance and publication. She shows that his vision was neither accommodated by apartheid politics nor adequately recognised and theorised by the extensive literature on South African culture. This book shows that Manisi’s poetry also reflects on itself – its own capacities and distortions – in fascinating and instructive ways that give it a new provenance in our literary history.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One:
Chapter One: Politics, Black Intellectuals and Publishing in Xhosa
Chapter Two: The Uses of Print in Contexts of Constraint
Chapter Three: ‘Independence’ Poetry and the Failure of the ‘Natural’ Context of Performance.
Part Two:
Chapter Four: Fieldwork and its ‘Unnatural’ Texts
Chapter Five: Provocative Audiences
Chapter Six: The Poet as a Liar
Conclusion
Appendix
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Littérature Africaine
• Littérature Africaine
• Poetry
• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776142989
• Langue: English

Extrait

Stranger at Home
The Praise Poet in Apartheid South Africa
Stranger at Home
The Praise Poet in Apartheid South Africa
Ashlee Neser
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
www.witspress.co.za
Copyright © Ashlee Neser 2011
First published 2011
ISBN 978-1-86814-537-9 ISBN 978-1-77614-298-9 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-77614-299-6 (MOBI)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover design by Hothouse South Africa
Book design and layout by Sheaf Publishing
Printed and bound by Ultra Litho (Pty) Ltd
For my mom, Dorothy, with gratitude and love
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
part one
one Writing in a vacuum
two Print as preservation
three ‘Independence’ and the ambivalent poet
part two
four Inventions for the record
five Provocative audiences of the academy
six Telling lies truer than the truth
Conclusion
Appendix Note on genealogy
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
A central purpose of this book is to engage with, and respond to, Jeff Opland’s considerable work in the field of Xhosa literature. As well as writing definitively and richly about oral poetry and publication in the Xhosa tradition, Jeff has recorded a wealth of original material which warrants extensive study. I am greatly indebted to his scholarship both for what it has taught me and for the extraordinary texts it has made available. I am extremely grateful to Jeff for having invited me to work on the poetry of David Manisi, for having hosted the visit during which I consulted the Opland Collection of Xhosa Poetry, and for permitting me to quote at length in this book from his translations of David Manisi’s poetry. For many discussions and clarifications, for the example of his work, and for his kind generosity to me, my sincere thanks.
UKZN Press published The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting , Jeff’s memoir of his work with David Manisi. I thank the Press for formal permission to quote poems and extracts from the book.
The first life of this project was as a doctoral dissertation, supervised by Graham Furniss at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and examined by Mpalive Msiska and Karin Barber. To Graham I owe the warmest thanks for his advice, for his own instructive writing, and for his unfailing kindness to me. Karin’s exceptional scholarship – always sophisticated, inspiring and supremely elegant – has taught me how to think about textuality. I am deeply grateful also for her kindness, generosity and support.
I would like to thank Patrick Lenta for having read and commented insightfully on the dissertation out of which this book grew, and for his support and companionship in the course of its writing.
Many warm thanks are due to Duncan Brown, who has taught me a great deal about oral literature and about being a teacher and a writer. For his friendship, outstanding work, and generosity to me over the years, I am deeply thankful.
At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, I had many talented teachers whose influences are everywhere apparent in this book. In particular, for what they conveyed to me about life lived with literature, my thanks to Johan Jacobs, Margaret Lenta, Margaret Daymond, Sally-Ann Murray, Jack Kearney, David Newmarch, and Itamar Avin.
Isabel Hofmeyr’s work has been a fine example to me for many years, one to which I hope this book pays tribute in its way. For her advice and friendship, and for preventing me from abandoning academia, my warmest thanks.
The University Research Committee of the University of the Witwatersrand gave me the publication award which enabled the appearance of this book; my very great thanks. Experienced, professional and kind, the staff of Wits University Press have been a delight to work with. My thanks to Veronica Klipp and Julie Miller and especially to Melanie Pequeux who managed with great patience and equanimity the project of seeing this book to publication. Lee Smith edited the manuscript with meticulous care for which I am most grateful. Peer reviewers of the manuscript were extremely helpful to me when it came to making revisions – thank you sincerely for your anonymous and generous acts of academic citizenship.
I would like to thank my colleagues at Wits University; many of the books and papers which appear in the bibliography have emerged out of the excellent scholarship at this university, where I am so fortunate to work.
Irma du Plessis encouraged me to apply for the URC prize; I would not have done so had she not suggested it. My colleagues at WISER were very supportive of the project and I thank them all warmly.
Having expressed gratitude to so many scholars for the example and influence of their work, as well as editors for their attention to the details of my writing, I hasten to clarify that the faults in this book – of which there will be many more than I can yet predict – are mine alone.
My dad, Tom Neser, died last year. He would so have liked to have seen this book. He asked me a great deal about my work in the last years of his life and we had discussions for which I remain deeply grateful.
My sister, Kymm Bingham, is the most dependable, loving, organized and thoughtful of people. Her support, suggestions and care are always at the base of the projects I get done.
Thank you, too, to Bill Wessels and Iain Bingham for support and kindness.
This book is dedicated to my extraordinary mother, Dorothy Wessels, whose capacious love, boundless support and lively interest in all I do are cornerstones of my life.
Michael Titlestad has been warmly encouraging of my work as well as an inspiring example as a scholar. For his companionship, wit and care, and for the conversation of a lifetime, my loving thanks.
Introduction
I n an obscure volume of Xhosa poetry entitled Inguqu (‘A Return to the Attack’), written by David Yali-Manisi and published in 1954, there appears a praise poem addressed to Chief Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela, a young Thembu chief who would become South Africa’s first democratically elected president 40 years after Manisi wrote him into poetry. Part character summation, part prophecy and exhortation, Manisi’s izibongo, or praise poem, for Mandela precedes its subject’s transformation into the major symbol around which anti-apartheid commitment would mobilise, and anticipates his future international importance. Although the poet identifies his subject as a royal chief, Manisi places Mandela in an African context of widespread upheaval, and praises him for his service to African groups within and beyond South African borders:
You’ve rendered services to Mbo and Nguni,
to Sotho and Tswana,
to Senzangakhona’s Zulu,
to Swazi and Ndebele,
to Shona, Nyasa, Kalanga; 1
you’ve bridged nations great and small,
forging African unity:
all its nations are gripped in one birth pang. (71–72) 2
As well as addressing Mandela with his traditional salutation, ‘Hail, Earth Tremor!’, Manisi creates a new and prophetic name for his chief, ‘Gleaming Road’, which predicts Mandela’s future influence:
Hail, Mandela’s gleaming road!
Nations name you Earth Tremor;
the poet names you Gleaming Road:
you set Africa blazing … (72)
Manisi suggests no contradiction in honouring his subject as a Thembu chief who is destined to cast off the signs of custom in order to transcend his Thembu identity. The poet observes:
Piercing needle,
handsome at Mthikrakra’s 3 home,
ochre-daubed torso,
Mandela’s son.
Beads and loincloths become him,
Though ochre becomes him he spurns it:
If he’d used it, what might have happened? (72)
Beads, loincloths and ochre are the outward symbols of traditional identity and indicate participation in local codes and customs. Mandela is beautiful when adorned in the costume of his rural community, yet there is value in his refusing ochre, the sign of ‘Red’ identity whose wearers spurn outside groups. 4 However, although he has rejected an exclusive Thembu identity, Mandela’s destiny is ordained, and he is given authority by his Thembu birth, as the final stanza attests:
Speak out boldly, son of Zondwa, 5
uncowed by genets or wild cats!
Even if death’s in store,
you’ve been prepared to serve
as blood offering for blacks,
for you’re a royal prince.
You were born to bear these trials and burdens,
loads and loads stacked on loads.
May the Lord bless you,
grant you success
in confronting the lackeys of evil.
Let it be so, my chief. (73)
The plurality of circumstance, identity and choice represented by Mandela as a figure, and expressed in Manisi’s poem, are mirrored in different ways by the poet’s array of affiliations and beliefs. In the early 1950s, Manisi was both a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and the official imbongi, or praise poet, of Kaiser Mathanzima’s Thembu chiefdom in Transkei. He was a mission-educated Methodist whose Christianity accommodated ancestral veneration. Throughout his archived poetry, he demands a single South African education system, but he also expresses his wariness of Western culture and his wish to preserve local Xhosa forms of knowledge. His poetry speaks of the need to bring the light of education and Christianity to dark corners of Africa, while at the same time providing anti-colonial histories that interpret missionary activity as having participated in colonial brutality against indigenous populations. Manisi was a proud guardian of the isiXhosa language and of Thembu and Xhosa histories. He was also a pan-African dreamer inspired by the hope of widespread black solidarity. This book examines the ways in which Manisi’s recorded and translated izibongo reflect, resist and sometimes b