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  • The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting
  • Ntongela Masilela
The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting By Jeff Opland. Durban: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2005. 389 pp. ISBN 1-86914-036-2 hardback.

In this unusual but pertinent book, Jeff Opland reconstructs the interaction between himself, an eminent scholar of Xhosa literature, and David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi (1926–1999), the distinguished Xhosa imbongi (poet), which occurred across nearly three decades from 1970 to 1999. It is very rare to find a scholar or a researcher and the subject work in proximity to each other, in fact, in mutual reciprocity with each other about their common passion, in this instance Xhosa literature. The generic form of the book is not easily classifiable, since it is as much an autobiography of Opland’s own engagement with the poetic output of his subject, as it is a biographical sketch of the intellectual trajectory of this imbongi. The third instance characterizing the uniqueness of the text are the many translations of Yali-Manisi’s izibongo (praise poems) that are interspersed throughout The Dassie and the Hunter. This makes it the most extensive gathering of Yali-Manisi’s praise poems in the English language. Most the poems, if not all of them, were translated by the researcher and the subject together in mutual collaboration. The scholarship of Jeff Opland is impeccable, as has always been apparent in the past: Xhosa Oral Poetry (1983), Xhosa Poets and Poetry (1988), and his other books. This intellectual seriousness is also realized in his latest publication, The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho (U of Witwatersrand P, 2007).

What then of David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi as imbongi! He himself first and foremost establishes his literary lineage as from that of the great Xhosa poet S. E. K. Mqhayi (1875–1945), arguably through practice the foremost exponent of African literature in the African languages. Mqhayi was the dominant figure of South African literature in the first half of the twentieth century, as surely Mazisi Kunene (1930–2006) will eventually be recognized as such regarding the second half when his yet unpublished twenty-two epics and anthologies are made available in their isiZulu original and subsequently in translation in the coming years. The listing of this remarkable work here, both in the original and in English translation, would be merely gratuitous. Kunene wrote this work while he was Professor of African Languages and Literature at UCLA from 1975 to 1993. An anthology consisting of four hundred short poems from this copious work is presently being translated in South Africa from isiZulu into the English language. What united the unyielding historical visions of Mqhayi and Kunene was a belief in the classicism of the African languages as being second to none.

It is the classicism of the Xhosa language that Yali-Manisi sought to continue in the second half of the twentieth century when he described himself as a literary descendant of Mqhayi. Much more fundamental, the classicism that Mqhayi was insistent on, exemplified in the poems that appeared in the newspapers Izwi Labantu (The Voice of the People) in the late 1890s and in the 1900s, in Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion) in the 1910s and 1920s, in Umteteli wa Bantu (The Mouthpiece of the People) in the 1920s, and in Bantu World in the 1930s, gave rise to extraordinary poets writing in the African languages who dominated South African poetry across the twentieth century: Nontsizi Mgqwetho (?–?), J. J. R. Jolobe [End Page 159] (1902–1978), Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (1906–1947), Mazisi Kunene, and Yali-Manisi. These New African intellectuals were a central part of the New African Movement that eventuated in South Africa between 1904 and 1960. Yali-Manisi and Mazisi Kunene were among its youngest members and its last survivors, which included Lewis Nkosi and Ezekiel Mphahlele.

In aligning himself with the intellectual tradition of Mqhayi, David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi inscribed himself into the New African Movement through the poetic practice he emulated. Like his New African intellectual predecessors such as R. V. Selope Thema, Simon Majakathetha Phamotse, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Yali-Manisi too came to...

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