Two hundred years of indigenous literature in South Africa

Abstract

As far back as the 1860s, Tiyo Soga wrote about the need to collect and write stories about African pasts so that they could be deposited in newspaper archives, which could become a ‘big corn pit’ of knowledge for the nation. His biographer noted that he was sometimes up after midnight in a hut, ‘notebook in hand’, learning from ‘wrinkled countrymen of his own’ about the past. Izibongo zoogxa, a compilation of some of the writings of Samuel Edward Krune (S.E.K.) Mqhayi, one of the most important figures in the history of Xhosa literature, is part of the multigenerational harvest that Soga envisaged, and there are two special reasons to celebrate its publication.