Praising the Subject: New South African Autobiography

In her introduction to the izibongo, or praise poetry, of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, Judith Lütge Coullie claims that such poems "do not always praise their subjects. Rather, they hail the subject of the poem[,] . . . identifying characteristics that make the subject special." Furthermore,

the reciting of izibongo is always a communal activity . . . [and] the poems are most accurately described as auto/biographical—with the slash remaining a permanent feature of the nomenclature—since the western distinction between autobiography and biography is usually irrelevant. Not only is it common for a person's praises to be added to or even composed by other members of the community, but they may also be performed by someone other than the subject of the poem in order to honor the person identified in the poem.

(64)

This excerpt refers to traditional praise poetry of the Zulu and Xhosa peoples of South Africa, but the criteria Coullie attributes to this style of oral poetry are also applicable to three new South African autobiographical texts: Coullie's edited collection, The Closest of Strangers: South African Women's Life Writing, within which Mgqwetho's poetry appears; Within Loving Memory of the Century, the autobiography of the Zulu artist and teacher Azaria J. C. Mbatha; and Spring Will Come, the autobiography of another artist, William N. Zulu. All three works eschew more conventional understandings of "autobiography" as an individualist, often alienating, undertaking —the act of telling the story of the self to the self and, ultimately, if that narrative is accessible enough, to others. Coullie's work, as a collection of women's life writing, is obviously polyphonic, but in both Mbatha's and Zulu's works, despite their status as single-authored narratives, writing the story of the self is also a communal activity, informed by a multitude of players, added to, performed, and, in a very real sense, composed in the collective spirit that informs oral tradition. As Mbatha states in the preface to his work, "I stand on the shoulders of others. . . . I include here many autobiographies that have heralded the miraculous dawn of freedom in South Africa. Greetings, my ancestors and forebears. . . . My river of gratitude to you is deep indeed!" (ix). Similarly, Zulu begins his narrative looking down from the shoulders of others as he chronicles a childhood visit to a Zionist prophetess in search of a cure for his enigmatic illness. During the ceremony, he claims, "many hands suddenly reached up to grab me, shaking me as I floated above a sea of animated sweating faces" (xv), and these many hands—in the form of teachers, doctors, family members, and friends—resonate throughout his story, actively encouraging and supporting his artistic endeavors, aiding him in living an independent and fulfilling life after suffering paralysis, and helping him find a publisher for the three hundred handwritten pages that his autobiography initially comprised.

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William N. Zulu's Spring Will Come is a linear account that requires the reader "to go a long way back in time[,] . . . all the way to 1879. This was the year that effectively marked the end of the great Zulu empire" (1). Zulu's story, in a sense, writes back to this "end," the invasion of the Zulus as the British crossed the Mzinyathi River at an area where Zulu later studied graphic art at the Rorke's Drift Fine Art School. Its subject is the perseverance of spirit, made possible partly by the assistance of friends, that allowed him to overcome two-and-a-half painful years of hospitalization after he was paralyzed as a result of unnecessary spinal surgery. Zulu, who became a devout Christian in his adult life, writes about the existential crisis that arose because he had no legal right to compensation from Baragwanath Hospital for the botched operation in 1975: "There was no need to pray for there was no God to hear my prayers. Even if He heard, He had shown his true colours as an uncaring God!" (67). Spring Will Come is the story of his career as a successful artist whose work, particularly the linocuts that fill the book and provide...