The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION The storyteller and the historian strengthened the will of the people to withstand apartheid's onslaught by firmly weaving images from the past into the experience of the present. We therefore launch this odyssey into the world of the storyteller with a set of genealogies, "Origins of the Xhosa," created by a respected Xhosa historian, Ndumiso Bhotomane, in 1967. A number of Xhosa elders were in attendance the day that I heard Mr. Bhotomane recall the history of the Xhosa people. The historian, Bhotomane told me, remembers the past in order to give meaning to the present. So it is that he recalls the significant rulers of tradition, those whose wisdom and activities contributed to the cultural heritage of the people. He begins with a bare list of memorable leaders, the shapers of the Xhosa inheritance. Other storytellers, including Bhotomane himself, would give flesh and dimension to this regal register by developing associated stories meant to illuminate and to make comprehensible, meant, as the storytellers routinely insisted, to move to truth. ONE A Zulu poet-historian worked in a broad space, garbed in the pelts of wild animals, addressing an audience that formed an arc around poet and subject. The bodies of members of the audience were sometimes in motion , held and controlled by the calculated movements of the poet's body and the music of his voice. The presence of both the leader, when the leader is the subject of the poem, and a portion of his people constitutes an event ripe with aesthetic and social tension. The artist catches in his artistically organized images both ruler and ruled in a combination that ties them to past cultural and historical experiences, which are vividly expressed and symbolized, and blended with realistic images selected from the contemporary world. But these realistic shards are placed within settings in which the uses to which body and voice are put are rhythmical reorderings of their routine functions-the cadence of delivery, for example , the sound of the voice-and within patterns of imagery that have no apparent relationship to reality. Meaning is expressed in the defining of the relationship, largely by the poetic line and its patterning, between the two worlds. Deneys Reitz described the Zulu bard and historian, Mankulumane. In the winter of 1923, Reitz and General Jan Smuts "stumped Natal in connection with the proposal for closer union between South Africa and 21 22 Prologue: Founders of the Inheritance Rhodesia." But, he wrote, "The people of Rhodesia were unwilling to be dragged into our race and language squabbles and our ideal of a greater South Africa found little support. We spoke in many towns and villages, but it all came to nothing in the end. A plebiscite was taken in Rhodesia and the result was overwhelmingly against us. Having said our say, we proceeded to Zululand, for General Smuts wished to examine the prospects of building a harbor on the coast. ..."2 At Nongoma they were met by some ten thousand warriors who were assembled to meet them, and Smuts received the royal salute from the assembled Zulu. Then the royal bard, Mankulumane, spoke. According to Reitz, he "was a magnificent savage of over ninety years, tall and erect, and every line of his heavy jowl spoke of strength and character. He had been chief counsellor to Cetewayo [Cetshwayol and Dinuzulu as he was now to Solomon, and the Zulus look on him as the greatest orator of all time. He spoke in court Zulu, a more involved language than is in everyday use but with some knowledge of their tongue and with the help of an interpreter I was able to follow him. He played upon his audience in masterly fashion. One moment he worked them into a rage and whole batches of warriors sprang to their feet to glower at their hereditary foes across the common border; then by a dexterous turn he sent them rocking with laughter at some witty tale of cattle or the chase. Next, in lowered tones, he spoke of the former glories of the Zulu people, of the spirits of the dead and of great battles of the past, and when he chided them for their quarrels they sank their heads between their knees and rocked and moaned in unison."3 Nelson Mandela writes of the storytellers of his youth, "[Tlhe chiefs and headmen . . . came to the Great Place to settle disputes and try cases.... Some days, they would finish early and sit...