Xhosa Poets and Poetry (review)

This book is an impressive product of solid scholarship that has unfolded over a decade. The fourteen chapters all touch on the dialectical tension between oral and written forms of literary representation across a century of South African literary history. Jeff Opland treats three overarching topics in this work: the nature and structure of praise poetry (izibongo), the actual and performative practice of major poets in a moment of historical transition, and the impact of written or printed literature on the poetics of Xhosa literary imagination. The fundamental theme is the making of literary modernity as a consequence of the unending contestation between tradition and modernity: in other words, the literary effects of the entrance of European modernity into African history.

In South Africa this historical drama has been arguably more spectacularly violent than in any other African country. Opland's thesis is that izibongo is not a literary practice that belongs to a particular historical period in traditional societies and that it will not disappear under the weight of modernity. For him, the very poetics of this literary form define the permanency of the interior spirit of African literariness.

With the ideas of Milman Parry and Albert Lord about the poetics of European oral literature as his theoretical framework and historical background, Opland undertakes a critical examination of how writing and the memorizing and improvising of the imbongi (oral poet or griot) have affected the form of the Xhosa poetic tradition. Appropriately enough, he analyzes izibongo in Walter Rubusana's landmark anthology, Zemk'inkomo magwalandini (There go your cattle, you cowards [Alice: Lovedale Press, 1906]). In an inspired appraisal of the Xhosa tradition in contrast to the Zulu izibongo in Henry Masila Ndawo's anthology Izibongo zenkosi zama-Hlubi nezama-Baca (Praise poems of Hlubi and Baca kings [Durban: Marianhill, 1925]), Opland argues that the Xhosa imbongi improvises in performance, while her Zulu counterpart invariably only utters what has been memorized. His in-depth analysis of these two contrastive performance styles ensures that Xhosa Poets and Poetry will be revisited many times by scholars in the future.

In other chapters Opland has recorded and analyzed the performances of the important imbongi David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi across two decades. One suspects that no other scholar has attempted such a detailed analysis of the living tradition of Xhosa improvisatory practice. He also details the transformations that the Xhosa poet S. E. K. Mqhayi effected in Xhosa literary history by shifting from izibongo to written Xhosa poetic forms: in other words, by making the transition from tradition to modernity. Enamored of comparative analysis, Opland contrasts Mqhayi's incorporation of European rhyme and stanzaic structure into Xhosa poetry to the similar undertakings of the Zulu poet Benedict Walley Vilakazi in relation to Zulu poetry. Here Opland shows how the impact of newspapers has both simultaneously inspired and diminished Xhosa literary tradition.

The truly extraordinary aspect of the book for this reviewer is the chapter on the female Xhosa poet Nontsizi Mgqwetto, whom Opland discovered on the pages of the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu (The mouthpiece of the people). Between 1920 and 1929 Mgqwetto published ninety poems, a few of which appear in the book in Opland's excellent translation. This astonishing discovery makes clear the fundamental role of women in the making of South African modernity or literary modernism. This extraordinary contribution alone assures the importance of this fine book.