Opinion Paper

Two hundred years of indigenous literature in South Africa

Andre Odendaal

Received: 18 Apr. 2024; Accepted: 08 May 2024; Published: 18 Sept. 2024

Copyright: © 2024. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.

Keywords: S.E.K. Mqhayi; indigenous literature; SA intellectual history; decolonisation; early African nationalism; transforming universities.

Firstly, the appearance of this book enables us to celebrate in a tangible way the 200th anniversary of the first published writings in isiXhosa in December 1823.^1,2 The arrival of a printing press in the Eastern Cape that year signalled the beginnings of the transition of indigenous languages in southern Africa from a mainly oral to a written form. The adoption of the written word by African people in the long term shaped in significant ways the whole trajectory of South Africa’s social and political development.

Secondly, on a more personal level, Izibongo zoogxa is the 10th volume to appear in the series Publications of the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature. The 10 Opland Collection books have shown like a few other initiatives how rich the possibilities are for plumbing the archives to recover the ‘lost’ writings and legacies of indigenous writers. Besides Mqhayi, these books have resuscitated the work of important pioneers of Xhosa literature such as William Gqoba, Jonas Ntsiko and John Solilo that otherwise would have remained securely outside the categories of formal ‘Literature’ and ‘History’, as a result of the resilient racially exclusive structures of knowledge production in South Africa arising from colonialism and apartheid.

For Professor Jeff Opland, the series named after him has been a magnificent achievement, part of a lifelong labour of love. His many co-editors and collaborators in the series, Dr Peter Tshobisa Mtuze, Professor Wandile Kuse, Professor Pamela Maseko, Professor Abner Nyamende, Luvo Mabinza, Koliswa Moropa, Nosisi Mpolweni and now Ntombomzi Mazwi, deserve special credit as well.³ Pamela Maseko is the General Editor of the series and co-edited three of the volumes with Opland, as did the distinguished writer Peter Mtuze. It goes without saying that without their inputs the series would not have been able to achieve the texture and critical depth it has. Opland, quoting Jeff Guy, has acknowledged this in an appropriate epigram in Iimbali zamandulo, volume 9 in the present series:

Without the insights into South Africa given by those who have been brought to maturity inside an African language, inside African culture, I understand South Africa less. I need an African perspective.⁴

This is the correct way to do things in my opinion: starting from a departure point of humility as a white South African scholar writing on African lives. Speaking for myself, I realise more and more as time goes by what a liberating journey I have been on, and what a big debt I owe to African writers, artists, musicians, mentors, struggle comrades, academic colleagues, acquaintances and many ordinary South Africans of different generations for the ways in which they have helped and guided me in my own writing and imagining of history over more than 40 years.

For generations, echoing colonial power relations, white scholars often appropriated as if by right the role of ‘specialist’, leaving the primary producers of indigenous knowledge and understandings unacknowledged. These assumptions continue to be reproduced – even if subconsciously – in the academy today. As Andrew and Leslie Bank have noted in their book, Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters, scholars need to recognise much more the contributions of African fieldworkers, translators and intellectuals to big works of the past bearing the names of distinguished academics.⁵

The Xhosa-language specialists aforementioned have collectively contributed hugely to a harvest that will expand the communal corn pit of knowledge Soga spoke about. And they have helped to give impetus to a new wave of scholarship that is part of a search for meaning and identities in the new context of democracy in South Africa, helping to reclaim indigenous legacies and restore the integrity and dignity of the literary pioneers and African intellectuals who went before.

The 200-year-long tradition of indigenous writing and thought we are celebrating is only now, 30 years after the advent of democracy, beginning to be acknowledged and properly institutionalised. Recently, I went to Exclusive Books in Cape Town and walked out with Siphiwo Mahala’s Can Themba: The Making and Breaking of an Intellectual Tsotsi (Mahala 2022), a recent translated edition of Masizi Kunene’s Shaka (Kunene 2017) and Lewis Nkosi’s The Black Psychiatrist/Flying Home! (Nkosi 2021) under my arm. I added Bulelani Ngcuka’s Sting in the Tale (Sparg 2022) to catch up with current political intrigues and gossip and found inside a lovely vignette about how when he walked to school in Middledrift, the young boy would pass Professor D.D.T. Jabavu – the University of Fort Hare’s first African professor – heading for the station to take the daily train to Alice. At the more discerning Clarke’s Bookshop, Peter Mtuze’s Indlel’ ebhek’ enkundleni (Mtuze 2022) and Foundational African Writers, a volume of essays celebrating the work of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele edited by Bhekizizwe Peterson, Khwezi Mkhize and Makhosazana Xaba (2022) were near the front door and I could not resist them.

On my bookshelf, I have relatively recent biographical works about and collected writings of Dyani Tshatshu (Jan Tsatsoe) (Levine 2011), Tiyo Soga (Davis 2018), Magema Fuze (Mokoena 2011), James Dwane (Dwane 1999), Katie Makanya (McCord 2000), Charlotte Maxeke (Jaffer 2016), Dr Abdullah Abdurahman (Plaut 2020) and African National Congress (ANC) founding figures John and Nokutela Dube (Hughes 2011), Sol Plaatje (Willan 2018), Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang and Pixley Seme (Ngcukaitobi 2018; Ngqulungu 2017) as well as, from a newer generation, Selope Thema (Thema 2018), Selby Msimang (Mkhize 2019), A.B. Xuma (Xuma 2012), D.D.T. Jabavu (Jabavu 2020), Anton Lembede (Edgar and Ka Msumza 2015) and A.P. Mda (Edgar and Ka Msumza 2018) and Athambile Masola and Xolisa Guzula’s first three offerings on 10 inspiring women artists, curious inventors and extraordinary leaders, pitched perfectly for younger readers (Masola and Guzula 2021a, 2021b, 2022). Masola and Makhosazana Xaba’s edited collection of Noni Jabavu’s writings (Jabavu 2023) is next on my list. Of course, standing there distinctively are the multiple volumes on 19th- and 20th-century indigenous writers – Mqhayi, Wauchope, Gqoba, Ntsiko, Mgqwetho, Solilo et al. – compiled by Opland and his skilled collaborators.

The above-mentioned African writers were, in the words of James Ogude, involved in a ‘layered cross-referencing which amounted to a deliberate attempt at building a literary genealogy’; they were ‘archive building’ and also ‘positioning themselves as cultural brokers of their world and of the western world to their people’.⁶

Our knowledge about the early intellectuals and their work is growing rapidly. We have at last started scratching just below the surface. A new literary and historical mainstream, it seems, is finally emerging. Institutional support and resources from bodies such as the National Research Foundation and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences have played a big part in giving substance to this new wave of post-colonial scholarship.

While democracy in its political form has so far failed to deliver on its promise of socio-economic liberation, it is not an exaggeration to say that in a literary, scholastic and cultural sense; it is spawning a renaissance of expression and questioning, led by young intellectuals, artists and scholars who are seeking meaning in the languages, images and insights of an African past. The body of scholars with the requisite language skills and sensibilities in the previously racially exclusive universities has grown to the extent that the African voice is finally, unquestionably, coming to the fore.

As is well known by now, S.E.K. Mqhayi was widely revered as the ‘Poet of the Nation’ during his lifetime of traversing the proverbial three score years and 10, from 1875 to 1945. His writing career stretched over some 40 of the 200 years of indigenous literature currently being celebrated, fully one-fifth of that period. He was described as ‘Our Shakespeare, Our Laureate’ by Dr A.B. Xuma, the dynamic medical doctor and fellow intellectual who, at the time of Mqhayi’s passing, was himself resuscitating the ANC and giving momentum to the work of new generations of African thinkers.⁷ Another contemporary writer, Walter Nhlapo, described Mqhayi as ‘the symbol of intellectual Xhosa thought and wisdom’.⁸ The recent work on Mqhayi has reinforced rather than diluted the views of Xuma and Nhlapo. Besides his fame as an imbongi or praise poet, Mqhayi was the author of numerous volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, biography, autobiography and translation, and in the annals of Xhosa literature, his contribution to the Xhosa-language newspapers is unparalleled in its breadth, scope and volume.⁹ Izibonga zoogxa, a collection of poems about his contemporaries, is the second collection of the writings of Mqhayi to have appeared in the familiar Opland series format of English translations placed alongside the original isiXhosa in recent years. It follows his historical and biographical writings published in Abantu besizwe and his occasional pieces put together as ‘a chronicle of the nation’ in Iziganeko zesizwe.¹⁰ A fourth volume focussed on Mqhayi’s letters and articles from his prose journalism is projected as well.

I have gravitated towards Izibongo zoogxa because the ‘Poems on Contemporaries’ provide fresh insights into aspects of the early history of black politics I am already familiar with from four decades of research on the topic. In his distinctive style, via profiles and personal impressions, complementing fairly thin existing biographical and historical information, Mqhayi offers fresh insights into the lives and characters of some key personalities involved in the formative stages of African nationalism in South Africa, in particular those connected with the prototype Eastern Cape-based South African Native Congress (SANC, also known as Ingqungqutela), started in 1891, and its mouthpiece, the newspaper Izwi labantu.

Besides its literary value, a reading of this book from the perspective of political history reveals several noteworthy aspects of the lives of Mqhayi and the people he profiles in his unsurpassed ‘richness of diction’.¹¹ As a result of the family he belonged to, the mentoring he received, the networks he was introduced to, the main locations he lived in while growing up and the formal school education he received, his career path seems to have been almost preordained.

Born in the village of Gqumahashe in 1875, Mqhayi spent his earliest years and the bulk of his school career in the Victoria East district, part of the heartland of the new style of proto-nationalist politics of the late 19th century stretching some 60 kilometres from King William’s Town to Fort Beaufort, at the very time that the first political organisations were being established and attempts at mobilising politically within the colonial system were taking off in earnest.

The Victoria East district encompassed the town of Alice, Lovedale Institution where Mqhayi was to study, various nearby iilali or villages like his birthplace Gqumahashe, Sheshegu, Macfarlan, Ntselemanzi, Gaga and Nxukwebe and surrounding areas. It was here that the pioneering Native Education Association was formed in 1880 when Mqhayi was 5 years old. Reverend John Gawler, the ‘head native teacher’ at St Matthew’s Mission and grandson of Makhanda (the renowned Xhosa prophet, also known as Nxele) was its first president. And, when Mqhayi was nine, it was here that the roughly 100 black voters – restricted to men only – famously used their muscle in the 1884 elections to send a ‘friend of the Natives’ to the Cape colonial parliament for the first time. By combining their votes to give both votes, each voter could cast to the same candidate, James Rose-Innes, they used the so-called plumping vote to great effect.

The tantalising fragments of information that Mqhayi and the editors give us invite us to imagine and understand more vividly how Mqhayi’s family was part of an unfolding history – setting up a village, sitting at the royal court, serving as early church elders and participating in new forms of politics during important times. Sheshegu, one of the places central to this mobilisation, was named after Mqhayi’s great-great-grandfather. Moreover, his great-grandfather had been a councillor of Ngqika (son of Mlawu and successor to his grandfather, Rharhabe, as Xhosa chief), and his grandfather was a leading member of the nearby Macfarlan congregation under the renowned Reverend Elijah Makiwane, the first black newspaper editor in South Africa. Makiwane, together with his fellow minister, Pambani Mzimba, and the 24-year-old journalist John Tengo Jabavu, headed the intense electoral campaigning in 1884, supported by a committee comprising representatives of seven different areas of the Victoria East district, including Sheshegu, Macfarlan and Gqumahashe. This manner of mobilising from the ground up in various communities, which then combined to form a representative district vehicle for African opinion, was a distinctive feature of how the prototype local and regional political networks emerged throughout the Eastern Cape in the 1880s and 1890s – later serving as a model for building national organisations. Jabavu explained that the truth … is that in the Victoria East district, you have a large number of intelligent natives. Some of these had their training in Kafir courts, or inkundla, and can grasp a political situation much more intelligently than some whose right has not been questioned. The other voters have received their training in some of the institutions and in the towns. Well, then, when the election came the natives held meetings among themselves and fully discussed their grievances and the kind of man they required. There were ‘local’ meetings, and there were general meetings. Questions affecting the district and questions affecting the colony – such as education – were gone into. Among other things, it was agreed, though not by formal resolution, that the natives were not to bind themselves to any candidate until such a candidate was heard when addressing his countrymen and when addressing the natives. The ‘man’ was to be estimated, his opinions carefully noted on both occasions and minutely compared … men who could be relied upon were sent to take ‘notes’ and report (at the meetings). These reports were compared and it was only then that a decision was arrived at. All this was done without the help of those dreaded influential missionary wire pullers, and … the discussion was very free.¹²

Thirty years later, this district was still politically important. While travelling around the country to determine the impact of the vicious Native Lands Act (No. 27 of 1913), Sol Plaatje spoke at Sheshegu, reporting on ‘an all-night meeting’ at what he described as a ‘famous political “rendezvous”’.¹³

Then there is the intimate manner in which Mqhayi learned about politics and became part of various networks. He remembers looking after the horses of Chief Mbovane Mabandla and many of his councillors when they came to Reverend Makiwane’s church at Macfarlan. The Mqhayi house was a stone’s throw away from the church, and ‘those horses would be left with us … and I’d be constantly chasing after the horses’.¹⁴ In the same text, Mqhayi also recalls that he wrote a letter in English ‘for the whites’ newspaper’ for ‘His Majesty’. Presumably, this was later, during his time as a young student at Lovedale.

It was at Macfarlan that Mabandla, ‘the recognised head of the largest [amaBhele] section of the Fingo nation’, living in the Tyhume Valley near Middledrift, convened a meeting in March 1885, which called for ‘native territories’ in the Cape, as well as those territories still falling under the imperial government, to be declared protected Crown Colonies (as Basutoland and Bechuanaland would become), rather than being governed by colonial governments. Responsible rule in the Cape, they concluded, had made Africans ‘victims’ of poor policies and, in the Transkeian and other territories, ‘the anomaly of their administration by a Parliament in which they have no representatives is productive of mischief’; the African people there did not enjoy proper protection.¹⁵

These calls for territorial integrity and autonomy for Africans led to the secretary for native affairs in the colonial parliament dismissing Mabandla as a government headman. This created a sensation among local Africans and resulted in ongoing mobilisation, which led to his subsequent reinstatement, as well as the formation of the King William’s Town Native Vigilance Association or Iliso lomzi (The Eye of the Nation) in 1887. This new body drew support from delegates representing well over a dozen localities in the King William’s Town district, organised along the same lines as in neighbouring Victoria East, giving us a drone-level view of the bases and networks that underpinned the constitutional activism of the 1880s and 1890s.

Mabandla, following in the footsteps of his father, who was chief and headman of the amaBhele Hlubi for 48 years before him, was using age-old lines of communication when he invited to meetings through letters, messengers or personally (riding on horseback) fellow chiefs such as William Shaw Khama of the Gqunukhwebe at Middledrift, Mben Njikelanga from Keiskammahoek and Ebenezer Mhlambiso from the Amathole Basin, as well as the hundreds of teachers, ministers, journalists and community representatives from localities ranging from Peelton and Ntaba kaNdoda to Mount Coke and Ngqushwa (Peddie), who became involved in the first educational and political organisations in this area.

When Mqhayi was 11, he was sent to Centane to live with his grandfather’s brother, Nzanzana, who had been appointed as headman over a section of the Ngqika forced en masse across the Kei River after the War of Ngcayechibi in 1877–8. This was the second locality to influence his life in major ways. Here in rural Transkei, Mqhayi was given a strong grounding in African lore and customs, which deeply influenced his sense of identity and future path. But, again, the combination of old forms of chiefly politics and the new constitutional politics was obvious. Nzanzana was both a Ngqika loyalist and a ‘moderniser’ who worked closely with the Ntsikana and Soga families, whose names are synonymous with the spread of education and Christianity in South Africa. Indeed, in item 27 of this volume, addressing John Henderson Soga (son of Tiyo and brother of the newspaper editor A.K. Soga), Mqhayi mentions that ‘we’re both from the same cow’s home … even our grandmothers’, seemingly indicating that their grandmothers on the matrilineal side were from the same clan. As can be deduced from reports in Imvo zabantsundu, Nzanzana supported the formation of modern organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of the Ngqika and Manyano ye Mvo Zabantsundu (Union of Native Opinion), which were formed in 1885 onwards in Centane, along the lines of the mobilisation happening on the approximately 60-kilometre axis stretching from King William’s Town to Middledrift, Alice and Fort Beaufort, where the family had come from. Nzanzana paid for his daughter Deena to accompany a missionary to Scotland so that she could enrol at the Dollar Academy there, where the children of Tiyo Soga had also studied. She was clearly a formidable woman. ‘This lady’, Mqhayi noted, was ‘a mare who gallops with geldings’.¹⁶

In 1891, aged 16, Mqhayi was sent by his family back to Alice to study at Lovedale, the most prominent black educational institution in southern Africa at the time, about which reams have been written. Supervised by the likes of John Knox Bokwe, ministered to by the religious separatist head Reverend Pambani Mzimba and learning with a self-aware trained student cohort, he became part of the emerging leadership that started asserting itself in the political life of the Cape Colony and later South Africa.

Among those Mqhayi honours with his praise poems are a few names that stand out for me because they were his leaders and colleagues in the pioneering SANC or Ingqungqutela, which was an important precursor of the later South African Native National Congress (SANNC) and the ANC. The SANC was Mqhayi’s primary political home in the decade after he left school in 1897. His introduction to it most likely came from school vacations he spent with its most well-known leader, Walter Benson Mpilo Rubusana, who had married Deena, daughter of Nzanzana, the cousin of S.E.K.’s father. This family connection clearly had a major influence on Mqhayi. On leaving Lovedale, he taught in East London, partly because of an obligation he felt towards Rubusana. Thereafter, within a short time, he was appointed as a sub-editor of the newly established Izwi labantu newspaper in that town, which Rubusana and his colleagues had started as a mouthpiece of the SANC. To set up the newspaper, they established the Eagle Press Printing Company. Rubusana was managing director and the company raised nearly ₤500 through crowdfunding, with a sizeable donation also from Cecil John Rhodes. This placed the 22-year-old Mqhayi – immediately after finishing his studies – at the heart of organised politics in the Eastern Cape, with an opportunity to launch his career as a journalist and writer of note.

Because of these SANC ties, I was particularly interested in his pieces paying tribute to Thomas Mbilatsho Mqanda (item 10) and Jonathan Tunyiswa (item 8). They were the longstanding president and secretary of the SANC until they died in 1916 and 1913, respectively. Like Rubusana, the two had also been long-serving members and among the rotating presidents of the Native Educational Association. We learn from Mqhayi about the African forename of Mqanda and his date of death, as well as the fact that Tunyiswa was re-elected SANC secretary for 3 years in 1912, before dying the following year while in harness at a meeting of the SANC. The SANC’s mouthpiece, Izwi labantu, went out of existence in April 1909, so information on the organisation after this time is scarce. Mqanda, a farmer, headman and prominent Methodist from Ngqushwa (Peddie), was also a director of the Eagle Press Printing Company, alongside Rubusana and the likes of William Kobe Ntsikana (item 9), W.D. Soga, Paul Xiniwe (also later the first sports editor of Izwi labantu), Rob Mantsayi and Peter Kawa, all influential supporters of the SANC. Note the tight networks that existed and how they stretched also into the fields of education, religion, sport and culture.

Mqhayi became one of Izwi labantu’s editors, together with Nathaniel Mhala (see item 14 on his brother, Sonzobo), George Tyamzashe, A.K. Soga, Richard Kawa and J.N.J. Tulwana. The formation of the newspaper was an important step in the growth of South African journalism. Mqhayi’s early writing, therefore, also reveals much about the broad conceptions and ideas that powered both this newspaper and the early SANC.

The portraits in this book are valuable additions to those of other SANC stalwarts and early constitutionalists already published in Abantu besizwe, including the likes of Dr Rubusana, Deena Rubusana, Charlotte Maxeke, Nathaniel Mhala, John Knox Bokwe, Isaac Williams Wauchope, Meshack Pelem (a founder of Imbumba Yama Nyama and vice-president of the SANC), John Tengo Jabavu, Charles Pamla, the teacher, newspaper editor and historian Richard Kawa, William Mpamba (of the Transvaal Native Vigilance Association), Edward Tsewu (of the Transvaal Native Landowners’ Association) and Simon Phamotse (editor of Naledi ea Lesotho and secretary of the Basutoland Progressive Association).

The profiles in Izibongo zoogxa stretch well beyond 1912 into later decades and go well beyond the narrow focus I am following to illustrate something of Mqhayi’s early life. They cover personalities from prime ministers to royalty, missionaries, ministers of the cloth and a number of women, who might present historians and those involved in women’s and gender studies with case studies of whom Mqhayi profiles, and how he does this. In each one of these profiles, I have discovered new information about people whom I have written about. These are insider reflections by someone who was close to the action, touching hands, sharing meals, learning, praying and sitting around the table with people making history during important times in South Africa’s journey. His descriptions of their social activities, characters, family and other interlinkages humanise them and help us understand their cohesion and political actions better, too. Political, religious, educational, economic, social and cultural activities were all interrelated, and part of a wider milieu in which the new literate spokespersons for ‘native opinion’ operated – the ‘New Africans’ that Ntongela Masilela writes about (Masilela 2013, 2014, 2017) and those who crossed their paths.

In 2019, the Tunyiswa family from Twecu Village near Qonce, not far from where Mqhayi lived, rededicated the tombstone of Jonathan Tunyiswa after discovering the historical details about him in my 2012 publication, The Founders, and in Mqhayi’s praise poem, ‘Umfi u Jonathan Tunyiswa’, which appears in this book (item 8). At this event, I was asked to speak about the life of their ancestor. Hundreds celebrated him, together with a king, a premier and his grandson, who had joined the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, and was now a Member of the Executive Council in the Eastern Cape provincial government. They had not known about his role before. Amid the ululations, as the pots of meat were passed around, I had a sense of history coming alive, a sense of its power and the living continuities with the past. Meeting the granddaughter of Dr Rubusana, there added to the poignancy of the day.

On 27 March 2023, Professor Pamela Maseko, Dean of Humanities at Nelson Mandela University, announced a programme to commemorate the ‘1823 moment’ that set in motion the 200 years of indigenous writing that this book highlights. In front of television cameras and radio journalists and a hall filled with attentive black humanities and law students that would have made the old Broederbond leadership of this former whites-only university stir in their graves, Professor Maseko announced in English and isiXhosa that the programme was part of a serious academic initiative by Nelson Mandela University to bring indigenous knowledge into the formal multidisciplinary study of history, politics, literature, law and the natural sciences at the university.¹⁷

To exemplify the ways in which universities in South Africa could be approaching this indigenous inheritance, Maseko organised a master class on ‘History in Law, Law in History’ presented by Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, author of the well-known book, The Land is Ours (2018), on South Africa’s first black lawyers. This was followed by an address by Barney Nyameko Pityana on African indigenous jurisprudence and its relationship to modern constitutionalism, as well as its possible role in helping to promote much-needed transformation in the present justice system. Pityana drew on Mqhayi’s work, Ityala lamawele (1914), grounded in his childhood experiences in Centane, to explain common features of indigenous jurisprudence, including a process in which (quoting Mqhayi almost verbatim), he said there was a consistent approach, starting with a statement of dispute; open participation in the proceedings by members of the chiefdom; hearing of the other side or audi alterem partem as a principle of natural justice; Statis decisis whereby previous decisions based on the same facts were generally abided by in line with the modern Doctrine of Precedent; use of witnesses and expert witnesses; judgement, after an open inquisitorial process, by a single presider who is a chief and an ending in which the final outcome was conciliation, with the aim of upholding the peace and the restoration of broken relationships.¹⁸

One area where change could usefully happen in South Africa today, Pityana and Ngcukitobi agreed, was in broadening the notion of ‘commom law’ by bringing indigenous jurispendence into a system that still relies almost wholly on Roman-Dutch and Anglo-Saxon precedents from the past (and therefore is not ‘common’ to South Africa. (n.p.)

Maseko’s introduction of Pityana, and hearing him recite Mqhayi, were moments of enormous meaning to me. For this was the Poet of the Nation’s first grandson speaking. Mqhayi died on 29 July 1945, and his grandson Pityana was born nine days later on 7 August.

Some 70 years later, Pityana has, like his illustrious ancestor, become a respected national figure known for his ethical leadership and fearless independence of thought. A renowned founder of the Black Consciousness Movement together with Steve Biko and others, he became an Anglican priest and qualified lawyer. Forced into exile by detentions, bannings and threats to his life, he returned home to play an important part in the transition to democracy, inter alia becoming vice chancellor of the University of South Africa, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission and a recipient of the national Order of the Baobab for his contributions to society.

Mqhayi had looked forward to the arrival of his first grandson, but they were never to meet, and neither did the newborn carry his surname. This was because Mqhayi’s son, Zatshoba ‘Zet’ Mqhayi, did not marry Barney’s mother, Ruth Pityana. He had volunteered to fight in World War II (the third generation of Mqhayis in six who picked up arms in defence of their land and liberty) and the relationship never recovered. So the youngster took the name of his mother’s family and was brought up by them.¹⁹ Ruth had been a bright student, getting a scholarship to study at the prestigious Anglican school, St Peter’s College, in Johannesburg, with its long list of famous alumni, including ANC president Oliver Tambo, trumpeter Hugh Masekela and writer Alfred Hutchinson.²⁰ It was through his mother’s family that Pityana developed his religious piety, discipline and love for learning. His mother was a nurse, and her second husband a teacher. Her extended family put everything they had into ensuring he was a good student.²¹ Among the teachers in the close-knit Uitenhage community, his mother grew up in was the poet John Solilo (the long-serving priest-in-charge at St Anne’s Anglican Church), a literary contemporary of Mqhayi, whose work is also the subject of one of the Opland series volumes.²²

‘It was in that family that I learned about values and was shaped’, Pityana says simply. Ironically, this was not from the Mqhayi side of his family, as might have been expected; they were actually dysfunctional in many ways, he recalls. His father was absent for most of Pityana’s life, and it was only when he went to school at Lovedale that he became aware of the Mqhayi legacy. One of the matrons ululated in praise when he arrived, and it was at Lovedale that he was introduced to Mqhayi’s writings and learned about his fame.

A remarkable aspect of this Mqhayi family history is its intellectual and political lineage, stretching across seven generations from the 19th century to the present. It might seem uncommon but is not wholly so. The influence of many of the earliest thinkers and activists can be traced through the succeeding generations. South Africa’s present foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, is the great-granddaughter of John Knox Bokwe, the Lovedale composer, editor, political activist and church minister from the 1870s onwards, who taught Mqhayi. She is also the granddaughter of Frieda Matthews, the first black woman to graduate inside South Africa and Z.K. Matthews, who chaired the committee that wrote the Africans’ Claims document in the 1940s and proposed the idea of the Freedom Charter in the 1950s. And she is the daughter of Joe Matthews, an exiled freedom fighter and later Cabinet minister under Nelson Mandela. In the same vein, George Wauchope, one of the founders of the Azanian People’s Organisation in the 1970s, was the grandson of Isaac Wauchope, who coined the memorable phrase ‘Dubula ngosiba’ (Fight with the pen) in the 1870s and was elected one of the leaders of the pioneering organisation Imbumba Yamanyama in 1882.

If one looks at the background of Pallo Jordan, whose writings in the 1980s helped shape the constitutional guidelines that laid down the template for South Africa’s constitutional democracy, a lineage similar to Mqhayi’s exists, running many generations back to the royal courts of the 19th century in Xhosaland. His grandfather, George Govan Ntantala, was the grandson of a courtier to Maqoma and councillor to Sarhili, who studied at Zonnebloem College for the children of African notables in the 1890s.²³ His mother, Phyllis Ntantala, was a political activist, author and feminist long before feminism became fashionable.²⁴ His father, A.C. Jordan, was the the first African lecturer to be appointed to the staff at the University of Cape Town and wrote what has been described as the first great novel in isiXhosa, the famed Ingqumbo yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors, Jordan [1940]), which deals with the tensions between modernity and African tradition. In a delightful and telling way, A.P. Mda, one of the founders of the ANC Youth League in 1943, named his son Zanemvula after Jordan’s main character in this novel. The first book Zanemvula read, aged eight, was Ingqumbo yeminyanya. Today he is a famous author in his own right, more commonly known as Zakes Mda.²⁵

Phyllis Ntantala wrote that A.C. was frugal, ‘a peasant in outlook’,²⁶ who treated African culture in a ‘dignified and wholesome way, showing its qualities and beauty’.²⁷ She said he was someone who was rural at heart, though you would not guess this when he was moving in high social circles, talking classical literature, history and music and starring at cricket (as secretary of the Fort Hare cricket club – the same position that liberation struggle icon Govan Mbeki held in the rugby club). These kinds of intellectual and political networks – their character and connections – are all around us, yet we still know so little about them; I argue that it is long overdue that they become part of South Africa’s intellectual history proper. Understanding Mqhayi will help one understand Jordan better, too.

I wondered how much these linkages had influenced Pityana as a person and a political activist and how much they meant to him. So I phoned him. He started our conversation with pleasantries: the sky was heavy in Gqeberha, he said, and it was threatening to rain, something much needed as the local dams were empty. I replied that these hopes often do not materialise, and he shot back, ‘except we Africans believe that if you go to the mountain you can make it happen’. We laughed, and I said that sounded like Centane in the 1880s, referring to Mqhayi’s sojourn and deep encounter with African customs and traditions there.

Pityana thinks there are traits he has inherited from Mqhayi, like perhaps his intellectual stubbornness and articulate manner of speaking. By the time, he was a Black Consciousness activist, he had become much more aware of the importance of his grandfather. This gave him a certain sense of the importance of what he was doing but not too much. George Wauchope had a distinctly ambiguous attitude towards his grandfather, Isaac Wauchope, Pityana remembers, seeing black clergymen like him as having been too compliant in relation to ‘the system’. But Pityana embraces his grandfather’s legacy and today reads his work closely. For him, the past and the present have come together. He also had the satisfaction of being in correspondence with his dad in a meaningful way before Zet Mqhayi’s passing in 1985. When Barney was detained, Zet would tell him how proud his grandfather would have been of him.²⁸

After listening to Pityana and the discussions on Mqhayi at Nelson Mandela University, I was left with the strong sense that this legacy lives on – through Mqhayi’s writings, and through his bloodline – and that there is much more we can still learn about and from him.

By combining vignettes from the original writings contained in Izibonga zoogxa with a history I have researched, I have tried in this Foreword to illuminate some of the young Mqhayi’s first steps towards political awareness and his entry into activism and writing – how the base was laid for his writings and political commentaries, which start here with his 1902 piece on Annie Pamla, a letter writer in Izwi labantu, who, he tells us, ‘debated like a man, with outstanding eloquence’ on issues relating to the community and nation (item 1).

On 26 September 1982, I was an enthusiastic PhD student and perhaps the only historian in the world to reflect that this date marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of Imbumba Yama Nyama, the first modern black proto-nationalist organisation in South Africa. It was called the South African Aborigines Association in English. These names were unknown in 1982, as were the organisation’s founders and the place where Imbumba was established. Academic supervisors and publishers alike cautioned me against using too many names in the narrative that readers would find difficult to pronounce, but I insisted, persisted.

Through my postgraduate dissertations and books, particularly Vukani Bantu! and The Founders, I had the privilege of introducing in a serendipitous way to a wider audience Imbumba and many other early organisations and the intellectuals and activists involved in them from the 1860s to 1912.²⁹ The journey changed my life. More than 40 years later, I derive great satisfaction from seeing a new generation of scholars bringing alive in a rounded way the thinking, actions and personalities of these pioneers and the organisations they formed. Where once there was just a name here and there, a few paragraphs, perhaps a page or two on them, now there are dozens of books, articles and biographical profiles appearing on a regular basis about the early pioneers and their organisations. The recent film documentary Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (Department of Media Studies, Rhodes University 2021), narrated by Dr Hlenze Kunju, who submitted the first-ever doctoral dissertation written in isiXhosa at Rhodes University, is an example of how the work of the early generations is being recognised and reappropriated and learned from by a new cohort of African scholars and artists. These were the intellectuals and activists, I argue, who first imagined and fought for an inclusive and democratic South Africa, though they have been invisible in the formal histories of colonial and apartheid South Africa.

‘In the colonial situation presence was … the crucial word’, the renowned novelist Chinua Achebe noted, and he added, ‘its denial was the keynote of colonialist ideology’.³⁰ The black subject was simply removed from ‘History’ under colonialism and apartheid. Similarly, Ghanaian writer Ben Okri’s main character observed that though the lives of the black subject had stretched back centuries and were remembered through legends and rich traditions, it was in the books that he first heard of his invisibility: ‘He searched for himself and his people in all the history books he read and discovered to his youthful astonishment that he didn’t exist’.³¹

At the 200-year commemoration launch at Nelson Mandela University referred to above, Pamela Maseko spoke generously of Vukani Bantu! and The Founders as being examples of academic work, based primarily on African source material, that demonstrate the potential for using indigenous knowledge to transform knowledge production in South African universities, by replacing staid old academic paradigms and developing new approaches towards history and politics. Similarly, visiting me early on in my research and writing journey, Jeff Opland expressed his gratitude that my doctoral dissertation (Odendaal 1983) had saved him significant time in doing his own research on early Xhosa literature. It is overdue that I return the compliments. In the series Publications of the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, Opland, Maseko, Mtuze and their other skilled collaborators have taken the process of historical reclamation to a depth, which we did not fully anticipate in the 1980s. Their work has made it possible for us to have realistic expectations that something much bigger is possible and still to come.

Ultimately, Izibongo zoogxa and this series and the many new works now appearing are about the reclamation of agency and the restoration of dignity for generations of African writers and intellectuals excluded from the academic mainstream in a racialised past. They underline the point that South Africa’s intellectual history has for long been in need of fundamental revision, as part of the broader liberatory project.

A new generation of scholars, fired by new post-colonial and decolonial imaginations, skilled in language and drawing on new technologies (such as the metadata analysis that machine learning of the AI age makes possible), has started feeding off and learning from a rich inheritance from which it was previously cut off. Scholars such as Jonathan Schoots are already using these new technologies to gather material, in ways that would not have been possible in years of research with the naked eye, to detect patterns of organisation and thought and to employ close textual analysis of and comparative perspectives on the work of writers such as W.W. Gqoba and I.W. Wauchope (Schoots 2022). Bringing the output from new technologies, new intellectual and cultural sensibilities, and a much bigger scale of indigenous scholarship into previously whites-only universities, the new approaches will take our knowledge to a new level, going far beyond where historians like myself have been able to go.

Since the arrival of ‘modernity’, indigenous intellectuals on the southern tip of Africa have been theorising and writing about their place in the world and the impact on Africa of the globalisation that accompanied the rise of capitalism and colonialism – how these developments would and should shape the future of the chiefdoms, colonies and countries that they found themselves in. But what did they say? What sensibilities informed their ideas?

There is much work that still needs to be done. The current commemoration of 200 years of Xhosa literature is an ideal vehicle for giving momentum to this task. The challenge that lies ahead for new-generation scholars is nothing less than the systematic rewriting of the intellectual history of South Africa, a project that has up to now proceeded too slowly in a ‘free-market’ and still relatively unfocussed and unsystematic way.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jeff Opland for the invitation to write this piece and Barney Pityana, Pamela Maseko, Nomalanga Mkize, Olwam Mngqwazi and Ncedise Mtise for support in its presentation. This article will also be published as the Foreword to S.E.K. Mqhayi, Izibongo zoogxa, Poems on Contemporaries (1902–1944) edited and translated by Jeff Opland and Ntombomzi Mazwi (Pietermaritzburg: KZNU Press and African Lives, 2023).

The author(s) declare that they have no financial or personal relationship(s) that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

A.O. is the sole author of this article.

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency or that of the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings and content.

References

Footnotes

1. Indaba (August 1862), National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

2. For a reproduction of John Bennie’s reading sheet, the earliest extant example of the Xhosa language in print, printed in December 1823, see Shepherd (1940, 7).

3. Nyamende, Mabinza, Moropa and Mpolweni collaborated with Opland in the production of Abantu besizwe (Mqhayi 2009), a publication that precedes the volumes in The Opland Collection but falls within the orbit of its overall approach and goals. For two additional volumes with the same approaches and goals, see Opland (2007), produced with the assistance of Phyllis Ntantala and Wauchope (2008).

4. J. Opland and P. T. Mtuze, eds., Iimbali zamandulo: Stories of the Past (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2019), v.

5. A. Bank and L. J. Bank, Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6. Ogude 2022, 27.

7. Jeff Peires’s Preface in Opland and Mtuze (2019), viii.

8. W. M. B. Nhlapo, ‘Spotlight on Social Events’, The Bantu World, August 30, 1941, 9.

9. As stated on the back cover of Mqhayi (2017), written by Jeff Opland (personal communication).

10. S. E. K. Mqhayi, Abantu besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings, 1902–1944, edited and translated by J. Opland (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009); and S. E. K. Mqhayi, Iziganeko zesizwe: Occasional Poems (1900–1943), edited and translated by J. Opland and P. T. Mtuze (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017).

11. Nhlapo, ‘Spotlight on Social Events’, 9.

12. Imvo zabantsundu, ‘Editorial’ (27 May 1885); on Jabavu and the natural aptitude of Africans for politics see also Imvo zabantsundu, ‘Editorial’ (23 March 1887).

13. S. T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, [1916] 1982), 178–9.

14. Item 22, this volume.

15. ‘Intlanganiso yama Mfengu eMacfarlan’, Isigidimi sama Xhosa, 1 April 1885; Cape Archives 1/TAM 7/9: no 57, Under Secretary for Native Affairs to Civil Commissioner, King Williams Town, 9 April 1885.

16. S. E. K. Mqhayi, Abantu besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings, 1902–1944, edited and translated by J. Opland (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 150.

17. P. Maseko, ‘African Jurisprudence Talking Notes’ (transcription of speech by O. Mnqwazi), South Campus auditorium, 27 March 2023, and Nelson Mandela University programme for African Indigenous Jurisprundence Master Class and Lecture, 27 March 2023.

18. B. Pityana, PowerPoint Presentation for Lecture on African Indigenous Jurisprudence, Nelson Mandela University, 27 March 2023.

19. The biographical details given here derive from Zoom and telephone interviews with Barney Pityana on 31 January and 29 March 2023, which he has verified as correct.

20. Chapters 3–8 of the history of St Peter’s College (untitled photocopies provided to the author by Jonty Winch).

21. Pityana interviews.

22. J. Solilo, Umoya wembongi: Collected Poems (1924–35), edited and translated by J. Opland and P. T. Mtuze (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016).

23. Maqoma was the son of Ngqika, the Rharhabe chief; Sarhili succeeded his father Hintsa as the Gcaleka chief and Xhosa paramount.

24. See P. Ntantala, A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (Cape Town: David Philip and Mayibuye Books, 1992), 7–9.

25. A. Odendaal, ‘Lived Experience, Active Citizenry and South African Intellectual History: Reflections on a Colloquim on “The Intellectual Heritage and Inherited Values of the Eastern Cape” ’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 97 (2018): 95–100. https://doi.org/10.1353/trn.2018.0012.

26. Ntantala, A Life’s Mosaic, ix.

27. Ibid., 109.

28. See A. Odendaal, ‘ “Heritage” and the Arrival of Post-Colonial History in South Africa’, Unpublished paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, December, 5–8, 2002; and A. Odendaal, ‘ “Native Lives” behind Native Life: Intellectual and Political Influences on the ANC and Democratic South Africa’, in Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present, ed. S. J. Remington, B. Willan and B. Peterson (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016).

29. See A. Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984); and A. Odendaal, The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2012).

30. C. Achebe, ‘African Literatures as Restoration of Celebration’, Kunapipi 12, no. 2 (1990): Article 3, 4.

31. B. Okri, The Famished Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 9.