contexts and communities in which it was read (1979). Mbulelo V. Mzamane discusses black urban protest poetry in relation to the impact o f Black Consciousness on black culture generally. Like Emmett, Mzamane acknowledges the role o f oral forms like praise poetry in the urban context, but refers to rural praise poetry as primarily a pre-colonial art (1991: 183-184, 188-191).
10 See also Cronin 1988, which discusses insurgent township poetry against the backdrop o f uprisings, boycotts, strikes, rallies and physical confrontations between protesters and police.
1985, Manisi explains his early nationalism as well as his response to Mathanzima’s support o f the homeland programme:
As a youth I had the feeling that we as a people had lost all of our rights ... [At Lovedale] I learnt from historical books, and I got the knowledge that all we had was grabbed by the white man. So that remained in my mind till I grew up to be a young man who could make his own decisions. So there was an ANC organisation fighting for the rights of our people. In 1952 I joined the ANC to take part in the struggle for our freedom. In 1953 I was at the great place Qamata as a praise singer. It so happened that one day my paramount chief, K. D. Mathanzima, brought the Daily Dispatch and he read to us a portion saying that the Nationalist government was going to give power to the chiefs, and he was pleased with that and he wanted to know our opinion. Well, I questioned him: if at all we are freed by the Nationalist government, why do they choose to give freedom to the chiefs instead of to the people who are fighting for their freedom - the ANC and other organisations? Even in the past, it was the people who were the warriors. So I was out with him, telling him that I don’t take it as freedom that is given to the chiefs because there were organisations fighting for the freedom of the people and the leaders of those organisations were the very people who should be consulted by the government. (2005: 20)
For Manisi, the institution of chieftaincy existed to serve the unity and prosperity of the people, and did not preclude the necessity and agency of other political institutions at the multi-racial national level. In the poet’s definition, tradition was that which fostered bonds of obligation, trust and common humanity among people. This sense o f rural politics and custom was not inherently conservative, yet it was rendered conservative and dismissed by the binaried politics o f apartheid. That many chiefs were in fact complicit with apartheid, and that the imbongi’s conventional freedoms were undermined in publishing and performance contexts by apartheid institutions and legislation, meant that appeals to chiefs like those made by Manisi were easily criticised for their apparent subscription to the political status quo. Whereas Manisi’s guiding principles made use of history in ways that owed a debt to his rural-based intellectual predecessors, urban resistance writers used history in new ways to reflect militant ideals. For example, like Mqhayi, Wauchope, Gqoba and many others, Manisi revered the prophet-convert Ntsikana, whose politics of black unity was moderate. In one of his historical poems for Opland, performed in 1970, Manisi excuses Ntsikana and blames Makana (otherwise known as Nxele), Ntsikana’s contemporary and opponent, for ills that befell the Rharhabe. Resistance and protest
writers preferred to enlist the example of Makana, however, because of his later rejection o f Christianity and his abortive but brave attacks against colonial forces.11 Chapman argues that, “in the Black Consciousness poetry of the 1970s, Makana was given iconic significance as a figure of resistance while the political prison, Robben Island, was renamed the Isle of Makana” (1996: 105).12
The rise of black city voices of resistance whose oppositional tactics were unlike Manisi’s in important respects, the appearance of a few brave publishers who would disseminate black writing in English, and a growing urban repudiation of rural- based tradition, seen as nothing more than backward, divisive practice, left Manisi intellectually and ideologically stranded, his terms o f reference suddenly overburdened, his desired publics divided, and his personal loyalties out of synch with one another. Indeed, in making a special case for the Zulu poets who had adapted izibongo to trade union contexts and to print form, Ari Sitas implies the binary potentials of praise poetry during apartheid: these trade union poets “and their vernacular noises, their pushing outwards o f the expressive resources of poetry in Zulu, are no apartheid adjustments, nor are they tribal embarrassments” (1994: 152). In the eyes of such poets, Manisi, rural imbongi, was just such a “tribal embarrassment”. Constrained by narrow publishing imperatives, estranged from the primary subject of his early poetry, and increasingly isolated, intellectually and geographically, from the broad appeal and legitimacy o f urban protest, Manisi nevertheless tenaciously pursued publication throughout his career. In the next chapter, I suggest how he reconceived of the mechanics of print publication as a way of writing for future audiences, which he tried to address in terms of their Xhosa and larger black identities. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall explore Manisi’s conflicting attitudes to what I have argued are mutually implicating subjects — education, writing, black liberation, and racial oppression - in order to suggest his reasons for valuing the written word despite his sense of its violent colonial origins.
11 Janet Hodgson discusses Makana’s life and beliefs as well as his appropriation by militant black writers as a symbol o f resistance (1985, 1986).
12 Eventually, Makana was captured by colonial forces and sent to Robben Island where it is thought that he drowned in an abortive attempt to escape his imprisonment.
Dignity, history, education and the record
In his performance poetry, Manisi frequently criticises missionaries and colonials for their promotion of Christianity, literacy and print among African populations. There is nothing new in his scepticism. Shepherd recalls, in his history o f Lovedale, one of the earliest occasions on which the Xhosa suspicion of print and Christianity manifested: the missionary van der Kemp was in Ngqika’s territory at the turn of the eighteenth century. When the chief “contracted a disease of the eyes, his people persuaded him that it was due to his attempt to read the word of God” (1971: 1). Opland charts a long tradition in Xhosa izibongo of mission educators as untrustworthy and of the negatively constructed image of the book (1998: 301-323). He provides evidence that for early Xhosa poets “[mjission education and European writing were linked to territorial dispossession” (1998: 308), and that “[t]he gun and the book are associated at the very dawn o f literacy among the Xhosa ...” (1998: 310). Although she was a devout Christian, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, for example, repeatedly wrote about her sense of the Bible’s association with treachery and deceit (Opland 1998: 314).
This idea of the ‘first’ book as a symbol of missionary betrayal and colonial violence is central to Manisi’s oral poetry.13 At the 1820 Settlers’ Monument in Grahamstown in July 1977, Manisi faced a predominantly white, English-speaking audience and declaimed:
for you entered bearing the Bible and you said, ‘Receive the tome and cast off lore and custom.’
We took up the Bible and followed you, minister turned into soldier,
he raised his musket and blasted his cannon. (159)14
At Vassal* College in 1988, Manisi brandished a piece of paper angrily as he performed a poem in which he spoke of the colonial invasion that, he argued above, missionary activity supported:
13 Several South African scholars have discussed the problem o f what the Bible represents to many