Nontsizi Mgqwetho: A Nation's Bounty

February 29, 2008 Jeff Opland, a leading scholar of Xhosa literature, has painstakingly located and collected these poems and then carefully and lovingly translated them with assistance from Phyllis Ntantala and Abner Nyamende. As Opland indicates in his introduction, Mgqwetho is “the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa.”

The resulting translation is a national cultural treasure, for the first time available to a larger readership within South Africa and beyond. The volume is indeed a bounty, full of goodness, literary worth and excellence. As an act of poetic creation and then of translation, the collection is an act of generosity, a gift to the nation and a wonderful reward for the reader.

As cultural and literary documents, the poems resonate with both historical and contemporary significance. One idea that now enjoys wide currency in South Africa is that of the “African Renaissance,” a term introduced by Thabo Mbeki in 1996 when he was still vice-president and then developed as the theme of Mbeki’s presidency and his pan-African presence through the African Union. The term is now routinely invoked in much public discourse in South Africa.

The term itself has a long history that goes back to Africa’s nineteenth-century intellectuals and their diasporic colleagues who grappled with the question of Africa’s place in the world and how it could reassert itself or “come back” after centuries of slavery, colonialism, racism and calumny.

Thinkers like the Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean writer J.E. Casely-Hayford (1866-1930), the Liberian diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), the Yoruba theologian and historian Samuel Johnson (1846-1901), and the African American philosopher W.E.B. du Bois (1868-1963) formulated ideas of African unity and pan-African solidarity as a method of political renaissance.

Nontsizi Mgqwetho enters the discourse and debates formulated by figures like these, adding a female Xhosa counterpoint to these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions on Africa’s future. In nearly every poem, themes of African unity, return and rebirth in the face of dissension and fragmentation emerge.

Central to Mgqwetho’s concerns lie questions of leadership and there are few organizations which escape her stern admonishment for lack of direction, strategy and purpose in the face of colonial oppression, on the one hand, and greed and materialism on the other (“our people slip / on slopes with carpets of cash”). In an age of Black Economic Empowerment, this latter theme has a particular pertinence.

As an early African woman writer, Nontsizi Mgqwetho anticipates many of the themes that have arisen in the critical discussion on the wave of African woman writers who emerged across the continent some fifty years after this Xhosa woman wrote her poems. One theme in this critical debate has been how women, who are hampered by lack of education and equality, authorize themselves to speak. As muted and marginal members of society, how do they make their voices heard? Can women writers use existing literary forms which generally reflect a male bias and turn them to tell new kinds of stories?

Mgqwetho adopts a number of ingenious strategies to solve this literary problem. One technique that she uses is to speak through different personae, both male and female. Mgqwetho ducks and dives through these different roles using them to amplify her voice and make her concerns heard. At times, she speaks in the stentorian and largely male voice of the praise poet/prophet, admonishing corrupt and ineffective leadership and delivering jeremiads against those in authority.

At times, she adopts the position of the male/female diviner and healer, offering her poems as prognostications and diagnoses. At other times, she emerges in a thoroughly modern male persona of the newspaper columnist (“Editor, thanks for the poets’ column”) and the female teacher haranguing her class (“Wake up!” “Listen!” “Think about it!” “Quiet!”). Another persona is that of the male preacher: some of the poems commence with a short sermon while one of her favourite admonitions is “Study the Scriptures!”

Yet, even in the role of male preacher, she seeks to feminize her theology and to promote a vision of women’s spiritual leadership. As Opland explains in his introduction, this theme emerges in her poems which deal with women’s prayer groups or manyanos.

Mgqwetho defends these organizations against male criticism that these prayer groups distract women from their real task of motherhood. For Mgqwetho, these groups offer women space to develop their spiritual gifts, organizational skills and leadership abilities. Perhaps like later women writers on the continent, Mgqwetho offers a utopian feminist critique of African leadership as too male-dominated. If women were given a chance to lead, the crisis might not be so deep, these poems suggest.

Another technique she uses is to feminize the hymn, a form that she adopts in some of her poems. As research on missions has shown, the hymn was a form rapidly appropriated into African Christianity. As a genre, it permitted Christians to draw on older performance traditions of song and dance.

In a constrained mission environment where Africans were afforded only limited avenues of expression, the hymn form offered a site of creativity for many African Christians: hymn writing and composition proved to be a genre to which African Christian men made a decisive contribution. Through her poems, Mgqwetho takes her place alongside these men and enters a dialogue with them. She frequently invokes the famous hymns of Ntsikana (the pioneer of Xhosa Christianity) but at the same time injects her feminizing concerns into them.

But enough of this analysis. As the tone of her poems demonstrates, Mgqwetho was an urgent person wanting us to move on to the task at hand. Or, as her poems might say, “Read! Study my poems!” A bounty awaits those who take this advice. From A Nation's Bounty: The Xhosa poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2007