RESOLUCIÓN N.° 457/MHGC/

proposes a second reading strategy focused on learning, showcasing and preserving. Manisi would apply these characteristics to the book.

certain. It is likely that Manisi was asked to contribute a poem to Arosi’s report that was worked around his memory o f the izibongo he had declaimed at the event. It was not usual practice to tape record such visits, so that the possibility that the poem is a faithful transcription of the performance it references is very small. Nevertheless, if the written poem is the result o f the poet’s re-imagining of the event and his performance contribution on that day, we can begin to perceive the potential layers of contextuality and textuality invested in the print product. The newspaper poem invites its readers to read as a way of accessing a specific performance and its context, and in this way the transcription mode that the poem invokes is particularly well suited to the newspaper medium. The large potential reading public is attached by the poem to the local community of a recent performance, which is revivified and re-imagined in print.

The book, like the newspaper, can be an event: it can unfold for the reader as a comment on the contemporary context; it can be shelved once read and never opened again. However, the book also commonly hosts many (re-)readings. In his advice on how to read his translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Soga characterises the book, like its protagonist, as the reader’s co-traveller. Readers are advised: “take things slowly, do not rush, read carefully and thoughtfully. Stop and think about what you have read” (Hofmeyr 2004: 113). The book is a patient companion and has lessons to teach the reader. For Manisi the archetypal book was the Bible. Its arrival heralded violence and testified, as did Bunyan’s text, to the book’s capacity to travel, proliferate and circulate across the globe. But the Bible is also durable and is experienced by its readers as containing intimate, exhortatory address that stems from the timeless voice of God, a voice that can be activated whenever readers open their Books. It is this capacity for endurance and for latent exhortation and address that particularly attracted Manisi to the book form. Like the Bible, which teaches histories and lessons and engages the reader with its ‘oral’ voice, the books Manisi wrote were intended to preserve the characters of important people as well as Xhosa histories that would speak with vibrant immediacy to future readers.

Written izibongo tend to work against the detachment offered by print media by constantly engaging and exhorting readers as if they are present to the speaker. The powerful emotive styles of address inherent to izibongo as a form are principally responsible for the performative qualities of the poetry in print. A reader is

anonymous by definition, yet Manisi writes his readers in vivid ways; in his powerful izibongo for Mqhayi, published in his Inguqu collection, Manisi begins,

Hullo-o-o-o!!

Listen, you great and honourable men Give us your ears nations of our land And he goes on to demand:

I say wake up nations and watch Crowds of Lwaganda and Mlawu,4

of he who speaks and zips his lips, of he who looks angry. You crowds of the one who makes news, ...

Yes, you crowds of Passes, of Mountains Join them crowds of Ntongakazi,5

crowds ofNdaba5 ... (Opland Collection: 540421.15)

In a long poem about Sabatha Dalindyebo, published in Umthunywa on 26 January 1952, Manisi orders: “Make way, Zondwas, for the nation’s calf s entrance”, “Salute, Halas, the son of Sampu’s coming”, “Oh yes, Ndyebo people, I give you forewarning ...”. Exhortations, warnings and reminders addressed to specific groups, to collectives, to whole nations, permeate and energise the poem, militating against the conventional relationship of detachment between reader and text mandated by print media. The reason why readers retain their anonymity as well as their self-regulated attentiveness is that, as Michael Warner has pointed out, they do not constitute intimate communities or audiences in the sense of locatable gatherings. Rather, readers make up shifting publics whose relationships to one another are relations to discourses maintained by the circulation of texts (2002). According to Warner, “A public is a relation among strangers” (2002: 55). Nevertheless readers of newspaper and book izibongo are not easily allowed their solitariness or their anonymity - the poems read coercively, heaping specific identity on their readers.

Even in performance, izibongo are geared toward both public and intimate address. Although most izibongo are addressed to a particular person, like Manisi’s poems invoking Mathanzima and Sabatha, praise poems always also address their audiences. They are texts that position themselves at the interface between different

4 Lwaganda and Mlawu are Xhosa chiefly ancestors. 5 See Note on Genealogy.

addressees, as mediators between these groups. In a praise poem’s dual address - of individual subject and broad audience - the second kind of address usually exceeds the limitations of the actual audience of a performance, calling an audience in terms of its local, national, tribal, continental, historical, political and other connections. Izibongo are thus simultaneously profoundly intimate - they embody and invoke their subjects - and broadly public. They function where the personal and the political intersect, and as such are peculiarly adaptable to mass media.

Although a particular performance izibongo does not circulate beyond its utterance, except through audience exegesis and discussion, it does participate in circulating public discourses, in terms of which its audiences receive its address. When izibongo are written, they become circulating texts whose audiences cannot be definitely identified or enumerated. The propensity at the heart of izibongo to address their receivers with thorough specificity works in slightly different ways in print and oral media, however: in performance, such modes of address open the audience out, expanding their identities beyond what is immediate in their gathering, connecting them in their imaginations to broader publics. In writing, these same terms of address narrow down the vast reading public into projected publics which, as Warner shows, either meet with readers’ recognition (in which case they succeed) or do not (in which case, the poem is inefficacious).

Certain propensities in izibongo - for public address, for solidity and detachability - are emphasised by the form’s deployment in print. However, the irrepressible energies and rhythms of izibongo, as well as their capacity for intimate, contextual address and immediacy o f exhortation, work in writing against the usual print/performance binaries. The actual economies of print circulation qualify print ontology. However, these economies are not uniform: J. A. Lent discusses, for instance, the use of media like newspapers in poor and mainly illiterate communities where resources are shared (1979: 18). Newspapers in such contexts may be kept for long periods to accommodate successive readers. Literate community members often read segments of the newspaper to their family and friends who cannot read, and so if what is read aloud is something like Manisi’s newspaper poetry, a form that has come to rest in print might be re-verbalised. This could also, of course, be true of books.

In Manisi’s case, print runs of his poetry collections were always tiny and the chance of a poem circulating was slim. Harold Innis makes the useful distinction between time-binding and space-binding media: oral traditions are time-binding

inasmuch as speech travels poorly, but their contents can be treasured and taught to successive generations in rich narrative and poetic traditions; printing presses and newspapers are space-binding because they emphasise circulation across space (1951). In the category o f time-binding media, Innis includes stone and clay inscriptions like Bushman paintings that do not travel but instead weather time and their environments, and remain as monuments and small portals of access to other times and worlds. Although both the newspaper and the book are primarily space- binding media, Manisi appears to have used the book as a time-binding instrument that would wait out uncertain days, a substitute for the shared memory of generations, presided over in more stable times by storytellers and iimbongi.

Poet of the declining chiefdom: three written poems about Thembu chiefs

An examination of three of Manisi’s published poems about Thembu chiefs - the first two of which appeared in newspapers in 1952 and 1955 and the third of which was published in 1980 in Yaphum' ingqina - reveals the poet’s changing relationship both to his political context and subjects and to his readers and the print media by which he appealed to them. The first poem, written to honour Sabatha Dalindyebo, was published in Umthunywa on 26 January 1952. It is a lengthy poem that evidences - in its overriding sentiment, its copious application of valuable names, and its energetic rhythms - Manisi’s strong support of the paramount chief o f the Thembu nation. The poem marks the year in which Sabatha toured his territory and visited the Emigrant Thembu at Qamata (Opland 2005: 64). By 1952, the homeland scheme was under first-phase construction by apartheid architects, and already there was a question mark over Sabatha’s succession to the Thembu throne. Yet, despite Mathanzima’s growing popularity as a strong alternative for paramount leader of the proposed Transkei Bantustan, Manisi continued to consider his chief to be loyal to Sabatha. The poem testifies to Manisi’s sense of himself as a spokesman for the broad Thembu nation, an identity that depended on the poet’s belief in Mathanzima’s loyal support of Sabatha. The second of the newspaper poems I shall discuss is about Mathanzima and was published in two instalments in Umteteli on 22 and 29 October 1955. The poem endures as a record of the final moments o f Manisi’s early attachment to his chief. Brimming with criticism and complexity, the izibongo nevertheless urges Mathanzima to rule fairly and decisively. Manisi’s newspaper poems are concerned

with the poet’s contemporary political contexts and exhort and encourage his subjects accordingly.

The third poem I shall discuss was written considerably later than the newspaper izibongo. Published in 1980 in his poetry collection, Manisi’s poem for Manzezulu, a local Thembu chief of considerable significance to the poet, has a more historical focus than the 1950s newspaper poetry. I shall argue, in line with my discussions in this and the previous chapter, that the shift in focus and medium demonstrated by these three poems, when read together, suggests the poet’s changing conception of his role as a publishing imbongi in contexts that increasingly separated him from contemporary publics. The 1980 izibongo on the subject of Manzezulu was published by an academic publisher and comes out of a period in Manisi’s life when he was engaged in university work and performing mainly for academic audiences.

i. Umthunywa, 1952

Heading the 1952 poem for Sabatha is a short introduction written by Manisi to make present both the subject of the izibongo and its poet:

This is Honourable and Respected, Prince Sabatha (Hail, Watch the Nation) the son of Sampu (Hail, Watch the Country), son of Dalindyebo son of Ngangelizwe son of Mthikrakra. He is the true heir to the kingdom of all the Thembu. The poet then says about him: ... (65).

Having asserted the immediate presence of subject and poet, Manisi begins his izibongo by appealing to the wide Thembu nation for their permission to speak:

Allow me, Thembu, to say a word, to ask questions until I speak for myself about my chief, Dalindyebo’s grandson, so that all the nations and peoples know that even we Thembu have our king. So then:

this poem, however, the poet’s appeal is made to the entire Thembu nation - to the tacit and popular understanding, which Mathanzima would in future years undermine, that the Thembu regency spanned the borders that artificially separated Thembu people into Emigrant Thembu and Thembu Proper.

As a way of igniting the poem’s rhythms and energies, the opening appeal identifies the poet as an imbongi who lays claim to the role o f mediator and publicist among nations. While oral izibongo tend to refer to absent and historical audiences in addition to actual listeners, Manisi’s concern to reveal the fact o f Thembu regency to “all the nations and peoples” is emphasized by the capacity of the written newspaper poem to circulate beyond the confines of the performance space it initially imagines. As I have argued, one of the most attractive aspects of print in Manisi’s view is its capacity for broadcasting local matters among distant audiences - that the opening of his poem for Sabatha explicitly anticipates a broad audience o f appreciative onlookers who might not yet know of the Thembu kingdom, suggests the poet’s investment in the circulating, publicising work of the newspaper medium.

Having named Sabatha with various epithets, Manisi ends the opening stanza with a question that goes to the heart of the context in which the poem was written:

Provider for the Halas,

the son of a chief himself a chief. So who makes claims against him?

So who lays claims to his father’s goods? (65)

For Manisi, colonial intervention in Africa has had the effect of removing from indigenous communities their rightfril inheritances - the inheritance of greatest value, certainly to Manisi, is that of land. The question of whether Sabatha would in fact inherit his rightful mantle as king of the Thembu, a question posed by Pretoria, threatened not only Thembu land, but also the Thembu nation’s fonn of polity and custom of rightful succession.

In the second stanza, Manisi demands that Thembu communities acknowledge their prince, Sabatha, as Sampu’s rightful heir. His exhortations have a quality of immediacy and active demand that leap at the reader from the page:

Make way, Zondwas, for the nation’s c alf s entrance, great bull that sees other bulls,

it starts at the sea and ends on the Orange. Salute, Halas, the son of Sampu’s coming, all o f you say:- “Hail, Watch the Nation!”

Watch the Nation’s the dark son of Watch the Country, Starer watching the Eastern Thembu

to guard them from nations coveting property, Maker of Majesty holds his west flank ... (65-66)

The stanza constitutes a powerful assertion of Thembu tradition and ownership against that which threatens them: in his statement “it starts at the sea and ends at the Orange”, Manisi repeats his persistent claim that Thembu land rightfully stretches from the Indian ocean in the east to the Orange River in the west. He commands Thembu peoples to call out “Hail, Watch the Nation!”, the traditional praise-name salutation accorded Sabatha, and then repeats the name immediately in the next line in which he names Sabatha’s father, the king, with his traditional appellation, “Watch the Country”. Manisi’s repetition of the powerful praise names his subjects took at their circumcision is designed, just as when he proclaims them in performance, to infuse his audience with pride in their community and with a sense of obligation to their rightful rulers. The command to repeat a salutation out loud is given frequently in performance and is intended to attract a rousing response. Here, the urgency of the call is not diminished by its effective silence in print - the immediacy of an oral context is evoked in the strong rhythm and insistence of the imbongi’s urgings.

The poem immediately reveals the poet’s need to communicate an urgent message to his kinsmen readers: that a serious threat exists to the health of the Thembu nation as encapsulated and nourished by the figure of their paramount chief in waiting, Sabatha Dalindyebo. In retrospect, it is perhaps one o f the poems bitterest ironies that Manisi repeatedly assures Watch the Country o f Maker of Majesty’s (Mathanzima’s) protection and support. In the extract quoted above, Manisi asserts a partnership between the two Thembu chiefs, according to which Sabatha protects the eastern Thembu from thieves while Mathanzima does the same for the western Thembu - there is no sense in these lines that Mathanzima might covet the eastern Thembu and their goods for his own more selfish objectives. At this stage, according to Manisi, the threat comes solely from Pretoria, an opinion he makes explicit in the fourth stanza:

White-flecked red beast, Watch the Nation’s son, tough tree of Nomathokazi’s home,

other nations could never twist it, even the whites feared him,

nations feared him till they turned to the whites, who lodged a complaint with Umtata magistrates on the same day a letter was filed in Pretoria with the great judges of Joubert’s tribe.

A letter came back from the whites at twilight denying the prince his rights:

that day we clasped our cheeks bereft at the graveside as if Watch the Country had died only yesterday ... (66)

As part of the way in which izibongo work to empower their subjects, Manisi emphasises Sabatha’s strength throughout the poem, and, in this extract, the threat he poses to weaker nations in their fearful estimation. That these weaker nations turn to Joubert’s tribe - the whites whose power base is Pretoria — to take action against the Thembu prince, is where the main trouble lies, for, in Manisi’s narrative insertion about a letter from the white magistrates, Sabatha is deprived of his rights by Pretoria and those who appeal to arbitrary white law. The act clearly oversteps the mark, leaving Thembu people as devastated as when their king died, but Manisi is careful to represent his prince’s disempowerment as a result not of his weakness but his strength. The whites too feared Watch the Nation, and their fear is at the heart of their unjust decree.

There are other instances in the poem of small narrative insertions that demonstrate the ways in which Sabatha has confounded and tricked Joubert’s tribe, intended both to build up the image of the prince and also to provide reasons for Pretoria’s concern about the Thembu leader. In fact, so powerful and strong-willed is the prince in Manisi’s sketch, that he even refused the wishes o f his cousin, the older and educated Mathanzima, who wanted to send him to Lovedale to be schooled:

He wanted him sent to Stewart’s Scots in Skirts to sharpen his horns to also judge whites, but Watch the Nation shuns the Vicious early next morning he pulped the plan:

Maker of Majesty yielded and zipped his lips. (66-67)

As I suggested in Chapter One in relation to this extract, Manisi’s sense that education sharpens one to judge or contend with whites was often countered by his loyalty to

tradition. Even if Manisi had hoped that Sabatha would pursue his Lovedale education, the poem does not criticise the prince, nor does it suggest that white concern with the prince is motivated by anything other than greed and fear of Sabatha’s power - such reasoning shores up the poet’s efforts to rally Thembu constituencies behind their prince on the grounds of national pride and traditional obligation. In this izibongo, the form’s special capacity for appeal to tradition and to