pening: Sunday 29th November, from 15.00 hrs - 17.00 hrs

exhibition from November 29th until December 19th

opening hours: Friday and Saturday 14.00-17.00hrs
and by appointment

Middenweg 22 Amsterdam

phone: 06-444 444 76
phone: 06-131 753 62

KunstruimteNP40@versatel.nl

In Mah, the Chicken was not only a known creature, but he was also greatly feared. This fire breathing chicken went by the name of Basan. His modus operand, albeit always constant, was highly effective. You see, he had a simple approach, not by choice I am sure, but simplicity, you will come to learn, is one of life’s most precious tools. And, what you will also come to learn, is that not all tools we come across are used for good.

You see, the town folk of Mah might have lived in fear of Basan, but they lived in reckless fear, and a reckless life always holds consequences. Consequences, my friend, that need to be learnt.

This is what life is about. Some of it at least. Beauty, pain, mistakes, lessons, rewards, risks, smiles and first loves, soul mates, dancing in rain and lying in the sun. And then all over again, with more. No order and no certainties. The sooner you realize this, boys and girls, grannies and grandpas, moms and dads, the more magical life becomes.

One can image that living amongst the fire breathing chicken, and the other haunting creatures in Mah, that the lifestyle of the strange little folk of Mah was all together somewhat questionable. One such example was their Thursday night gathering. This was a time of crude carnivalesque indulgence; a night of celebrating nothing in particular and everything at once.

A charged circuit of strange creatures dancing merrily; their shiny feet all one toe short. A sight this made indeed. You see, without all your toes, dancing becomes ever more entertaining to watch. This unusual – to us at least – Toe Conundrum might have made witnessing the wee Mah folk dancing amusing, it was also conundrum that Basan took advantage of.

The chortles, murmurs, sniggers, occasional grunts, much laughter and some piercing shrieks began to dissolve into glitchy echoes as the waning moon begin to fade. Echoes that would spend the week hiding amongst the prickly pear forest that towered around Rah - a forest of secrets and a forest one did not venture in. It kept the trespassers out, and the town folk in.

The echoes, hiding amongst the prickly leaves and mile roots, would wait anxiously until Thursday arrived, distracting the little folk and causing a bit of frenzied behavior. As the echoes began to rustle in exciting they signaled to the Chicken Monster that the evening would hold much excitement, tragic for the folk but satisfying for Basan.

For Thursday evening, as the chaos crumbled and the wee folk wandered home in the dark, was the time for Basan to do to his own little dance. A dance of fire. A dance with consequences.

By Atiyyah Khan

When I interview Aryan Kaganof, I try my best to avoid mentioning that the first time I saw him perform he was naked, suspended from a rope, hanging upside down from the ceiling.

Known for pushing the boundaries as a filmmaker, director, poet, novelist, musician and blogger, Kaganof is thankfully not intimidating at all in person. Although he does suggest that we both stay quiet and rather telepathise the interview in a mind battle.

Kaganof is the architect behind a collaboration that brings together a collection of mind-bending artists in the upcoming Badilisha Poetry X-Change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. In Kiswahili, “Badilisha” is an expression denoting change, exchange and transformation.

The festival is curated by poet Malika Ndlovu and arts manager Lorelle Viegi.

Kaganof will present his African Noise Foundation, consisting of an explosive line-up of Warrick Sony (Kalahari Surfers), musician and composer Zim Ngqawana, legendary Uhadi bow player Mantombi Matotiyana and Xhosa singer David Mayekane.

“Noise,” he explains, ” is a sign of our culture. It’s everything that people in charge want you not to hear and not to see.” Together the collective hopes to create a space of “healing alchemy”. He says that in putting this piece together, he feels “the second most excited since having a baby”.

Ngqawana, despite being highly revered in the music community, is scarcely seen performing in Cape Town.

“This country has a terrible history of neglecting its great jazz artists while they’re still alive,” says Kaganof. “And I think it’s insane that Zim isn’t playing constantly.”

Describing the musician as a “compositional genius and an improviser” he adds: “It’s a dream come true to put people like Zim and Warrick together because they’ve never worked together before.”

He tells me this story: “I first saw Warrick in Cape Town in 1978 at a club called Scratch (named after Lee “Scratch” Perry) that was one of the few non-racial clubs in the country. I was 15 at the time and he was playing in this band called The Happy Ships.”

Kaganof claims to have seen Sony playing the “scissors” and continues: “My whole aim was bringing him back to those kinds of acoustic instruments.”

Kaganof talks about non-racial clubs during the ’80s as a group of political partygoers all “dancing their way to freedom”.

“I’m still trying to dance my way to freedom,” he confesses.

About the project at the festival, he says: “We don’t want to set limits, everyone is coming in with absolute openness.” This is Kaganof’s way of bringing these hugely diverse artists together, in producing something that could possibly never be seen again.

The African Noise Foundation was originally started in 1999. “It is an umbrella and in that umbrella the personnel can always shift and change, but it’s a way of putting people together in ways that don’t fit within a genre. Putting these artists together was too important not to do.”

more info here

The build-up to Badilisha will include a series of workshops from November 24-26 at various venues in the city. Kaganof will present Lost For Words: Working in Collectives, which will aim to deconstruct poetic conventions and discuss language exhausted of meaning. The festival includes international performers Dorothea Smartt (UK), Warsan Shire (Somalia) and Ngoma Hill (US).

# Check out the Badilisha Poetry X-change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. Time: 7.30pm. Tel: 021 422 0468. Info: www.badilishapoetry.com

this article first published in tonight.co.za

read her opinions and insights into the south african art condition here: http://corrigall.blogspot.com/

The body. The Self. Projection.
The thoughts raced to kiss his mind.
“The man. He seemed to have been listening in on my thoughts prior to his dramatic entrance.”
Awaking from sleep.
“I must take the body with.” He thought hard and even considered teleporting the whole molecular structure to the winter upside.
The pallid arena was still as he recalled, vast and coldly un-minding of its vain size.
There is glitch in the flow. Any human mind is believed to transmit and receive data, stimuli almost simultaneously; this he was taught once.
But his carrier seemed to only transmit an echo of what he fed without generating any internal response.
A cold silence of a corpse.
The bloated insides calling back with its walls and muscle.
His brain was being sucked out.
Psychic lobotomy.
”The savages and the lengths they would go to for victory.”

In thought-speed he’d returned to the body, jerking it up from the table and thrashing its anaesthetized bones to the cold floor. Eyes shot open and shadowy light increased the urgency in the carrier. Khah knew that interface cables would be stuck to the skull, and prepared for the severance pinch and scarring pain.
He held the carrier’s hand behind the occiput and pulled whatever imaginary cable injected into custom data ports every clone had implanted in the heydays of memory enhancement techniques.
The field of vision began to morph, and he felt faint but kept courage.
The pallid arena and its fluorescent mirage faded like smoke before his eyes.
He was standing clothed in black rubber combat suit, strapped to a ruggedly tattered chair which would pass for a couch in happier times.
Monitors glared at him, pallid men nervously punching digits into buttons.
He was himself again, he felt it. A warrior.
As rage seethed like bile through his throat, the colossal arms of a menial wrestler tore the straps from their hinges. His feet rummaged the console tightened around his ankle.
Khah rose frantically before security personnel could secure an attack with electrocution rods.
He was human built for brawls. Brown skinned with brawn and brain now intact.
Monstrous events followed what he perceived to be seconds, finding his acumen for molecular disintegration as prescribed by the combat attire.
He shot through equipments, monitors splattering on steel floors with wires sizzling in the after-heat of his light-speed motion.
Phantom warrior dismantled the place.
But as soon as he took a breath outside the cage bolted door to the experimentation laboratory, he became furiously confused.
It was pitch black. Ghastly winds summoned ash towards his gaping mouth, coal dust from scotched forests and grass-lands lain waste by sulphur of molten blazes - a Venusian clime of burning shadows.
He hammered about rowdily with the electrode rod he confiscated from the assailants, leather cloak symbiotically folding about the crevices of his terse figure - and found that there was nothing.
Poking behind him, he felt a hard surface that clanked to the impact of the rod.
Upon running his palm on the surface, he made it out be a wall.
A colossal wall; a wall of a fortress.
He was free.
“This was, or must be the Panopticon.”
Rushes of memory flickered inside, horrible recollections of imprisonment, countering the eminent realization of the danger of his imminent surroundings.
And it was soon that he realized a pair of flame red eyes approaching from a distance, shrouded in the blanket of blinding darkness.
Another pair loomed from behind the first, then a multitude waltzed rhythmically towards Khah.
They must have stood no more than his knee height.
They were Plutonian.
“Tok!” Khah screamed in the direction of the advancing mob of crimson eyes.
“It is us Master Khah,” said the Plutonians in chorale unison, sending a belch of relief through Khah’s taut belly.
“We have come to take you to The Highlands.” Tok spoke alone.
“The highlands? But, I thought they were still unsafe. How is Master Motk?”
“He’s well, sending regards to you. And beckoning you return god-speed.” Tok responded.
One of the members of the throng handed Khah a pair of infrared spectacles for better vision, which he clumsily accepted.
The spectacles had been designed by the Plutonians, excruciatingly modeled after their own eyes.
They had no difficulty navigating any kind of darkness.
Tok always boasted that there is not darkness like his days - telepathically that is.
“We have seen the copper sky, Master Khah.”
Khah was aghast.
That would mean the storm-clouds were letting through sun rays.
Illumination.
This meant yet another struggle for adaptation and survival. No-one knew what remaining resources still lay among the ruins of a collapsed civilization.
And it meant the first expedition would have to be his clan’s.
He was content with the knowledge of the danger time would usher forth, but he felt much relieved that the eternal night had ceased.
He had never gone silently into this night, and now was his opportunity to defeat its scepter.

keep reading here

lALEXIS Preller’s art was due for a re-reading. Or so asserts Clive Kellner in the new box set published to coincide with this retrospective - the last was staged in 1972.

Pegged as sharing close ties with the Symbolism, Surrealism and other western art movements it is suggested that Preller’s art should no longer be viewed through a Modernist (European) lens.

Kellner and Karel Nel, co-author of the book and curator of the exhibition, furthermore suggest that, if anything, Preller was a “pre-postmodernist” because he forged a unique vernacular that rallied against “dominant colonial orthodoxy”.

It all sounds good and in their text Kellner and Nel make a fairly good case, using terms such as “appropriated” and quoting from the likes of Rasheed Araeen, the recalcitrant English artist and writer who has made a habit of challenging western hegemony.

But, unfortunately, Preller’s paintings tell another story. One that, regrettably, appears to confirm a primitivist impulse at work. In other words there isn’t too much difference between his outlook and that of Modernists, such as Pablo Picasso, who also took their cue from African culture.

Without a doubt Preller’s motives for employing an African idiom diverged quite considerably from European Modernists, who were mainly interested in the formal qualities implicit in African cultural products - and, of course, their own projections of what African culture embodied.

Preller’s art also evidences a fixation with the stylistic character of African art and culture but it is suggested that, for him, it provided the means with which to identify himself with an African identity - Nel’s case hinges on this fact.

Of course, this urge only manifested after visiting the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris where Picasso also uncovered the “spirit” of Africa. Ultimately, though, what really counts is what Preller’s idea of what that African identity constituted and how he translated that into his art.

Without a doubt Preller developed an African-inspired aesthetic that drew from the European canon but (re)worked the African elements in quite a different manner.

His vocabulary is the result of an amalgamation of visual references drawn from a variety of ethnicities or cultures on the continent. It is this aspect, perhaps, which has led Nel and Kellner to suggest that Preller might have been a forerunner to the post-modern movement; with a stretch one could think of it as a syncretic language that collapses time and space - iconography from Ancient Egyptian, Greek and traditional African dress are melded into a singular expressive form. Of course, Preller doesn’t do so with any level of irony or self-reflexivity.

With works such as The Kraal II (1948), which shows an array of different African cultures shown to be inhabiting a rural village, one is left with the impression that Preller perceived African expression to be underpinned by a unifying theme, that there was an essence which intrinsically connects all African cultures.

This essence that Preller sought to describe or seek out isn’t predicated on any definable features but rather an intangible “mystique”. In this way his art positions the African as an unknowable and thus exotic other.

This painting is a good example of his brand of magical realism, in which a figurative image is infused with fantasy elements such as a drum that is balanced on the back of a mythical creature. A group of miniature people dance on the drum’s surface around a large candle. The fantasy features allow Preller to give physical expression to the mythical nature of African cultural practices.

It is hard to reconcile this idealised image of black people living in harmony in a rural idyll with what was happening in South Africa in 1948 - when apartheid policies were installed as law - when the painting was completed. Preller appears to have chosen to bury himself - and his viewers - in a fantastical vision of Africa drawn from the past or the imagination rather than face reality. It is within an imagined idea of Africa that he tries to locate his identity so whatever connection he forged couldn’t have felt authentic. His motives may have been genuine but his method was superficial.

Like Picasso et al his art does not evince a heightened interest in African culture per se but rather its external visual manifestations, such as the design and form of African sculpture, dress and patterned fabrics. But he subverts his sources, imbuing designs and patterns of his own making into the African dress of his subjects, consequently claiming ownership of their culture.

But perhaps the most bothersome aspect of his art is the manner in which the object/subject collapse into each other, demonstrating the manner in which he objectified his African subjects. Almost all his subjects parade a rigid deportment but it is only when one views Adam and Eve (1955), which features two large wooden effigies which are seated on a stool supported by a series of smaller wooden figurines, that it becomes obvious that mostly Preller’s African subjects are modelled on statues and not real-life subjects.

It is easy to understand why Nel and Kellner have tried to reframe Preller’s art: if he isn’t a pre-postmodernist, his status within South Africa’s art canon remains problematic.

Alexis Preller: Africa, the Sun and Shadows is showing at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until December 5.

this article was first published in the sunday independent

let’s get up

the night is ours

at the womb of the town

a factory

acidic air

sweating bodies appears in the dark

and castrated love of vampires

looks as if turning alive

in a gloom

the filth on the floor

the noises in skulls

confused memories

of coincidental gestures

are falling into cracks

falling this crumbling world

and it seems that the night is dying

although the journey is just about to begin

in the depth of the city

among wretches

I don’t tell you any needless word

As I talk about my million lives

My happiness and sufferings

Brakes into sound waves

At the same time

On 100 monitors

And everyone can see

that the power is endless

and the music just surging and alarms

get lights in the eyes

and blood runs out from faces

we are sinking down to the

deepest hell tonight

we all meet tonight

and our useless life

connecting to the flow

we are floating away

towards the world

beyond time

and our memories

woven from death

disintegrate

as they fall onto hard stones

and god staring out

from behind our eyes

and EGO evaporates

and this madness

which is always too near

disappears with the morning shades

But perhaps I can tell you something about what happens to language under such circumstances. How does it resist the unflagging pressure of the new environment? Does anything alter in its aggregate state, in its specific weight? Does it become more domineering, more aggressive? Or does it turn into itself and hide? Does it grow more intimate? After all, it might conceivably become a secret language, that one uses only for oneself.

Well, the first thing to happen was that one confronted it with a different sort of curiosity. One compared more, especially in the most everyday phrases, in which the differences were conspicuous and palpable. Literary confrontations turned into very concrete encounters in socializing. The earlier or chief language became odder and odder, namely in details. /Everything/ about it was conspicuous, whereas earlier only a few things were that.

At the same time, one could sense a lessening of self-complaisance. For one personally saw cases of writers who had given up and gone over to the new country’s language for practical reasons. They lived, so to speak, in the vanity of their new effort, which was meaningful only if it succeeded. How often did I hear both gifted and ungifted people say in almost silly pride” ‘I now write English!’ Yet the man who clung to the earlier written language, and without any prospect of achieving some external goal, must have regarded himself as abdicating in terms of the public. He competed with no one, he was alone, he was also a bit ridiculous. He was in a predicament, it seemed hopeless, the people sharing his fate might consider him a fool, and the people in the host country, among whom he did have to live, viewed him for a long time as a nobody.

Under such circumstances, it can be expected that many things become more private and more intimate. One says certain things to oneself that one would otherwise never have let pass. The conviction that nothing will ever come of it, that it has to remain private - no readership is conceivable, after all - gives one a bizarre sense of freedom. Among all these people who speak their daily things in English, one has a secret language for oneself, which serves no outer purposes anymore, which one utilizes nearly alone, to which one clingsmore and more obstinately, the way people may cling to a faith that is taboo in their greater environment.

Well, that is the more superficial aspect of the matter; there is a further aspect, that one realizes only gradually. A man with literary interests tends to assume it is the works of writers that represent a language to one. To some extent, that is certainly the case; and ultimately, one does live on them. But the discoveries one makes by living in the realm of a different language include a very special one: namely, that it is the words themselves that do not let one go, the individual words per se, beyond any larger intellectual contexts. The peculiar strength and energy of words can be felt most strongly when one is often forced to replace them with others. The dictionary of the hardworking student who has striven to learn a foreign tongue is suddenly reversed, everything wants to be named as it was named earlier and actually. The second language, which one hears all the time anyway, becomes banal, it is taken for granted; the first language, defending itself, appears in a special light.

I recall that in England, during the war, I filled page after page with German words. They had nothing to do with what I was working on. Nor did they join together into any sentences, and naturally they did not figure in the notes I jotted down in those years. They were isolated words, never yielding any sense. It would suddenly take me by storm, and I would cover a few pages with words, as fast as lightning. Very often they were nouns, but not exclusively; there were also verbs and adjectives among them. I was ashamed of these attacks and concealed the pages from my wife. I spoke German with her; she had come with me from Vienna. I know of very little else that I ever concealed from her.

I viewed these word attacks as pathological and did not wish to make her uneasy; like all other people, we had enough things to make us uneasy and that could not be concealed. Perhaps I should also mention that it really goes against my grain to smash words or warp them in any manner, their form is inviolable for me, I leave it intact. Thus, one can hardly imagine a more foolish occupation than stringing together unscathed words. When I sensed that such a word attack was imminent, I would lock myself in as though to work. I ask your forgiveness for bringing up such a private absurdity, but I must add that I felt extremely happy during such fits. Since then, there has been no doubt for me that words are charged with a special kind of passion. They are really like human beings, they refuse to be neglected or forgotten. However they may be preserved, they maintain their life; they suddenly spring forth and demand their rights.

Word attacks of that sort are certainly a sign that the pressure on language has gotten very great, that one not only knows - in this case - English well, but also that it very often forces itself upon one. A rearrangement has formed in the dynamics of words. The frequency of what one hears leads not only to one’s noting it, but also to new inducements and suggestions, motions and countermotions. Many an old, current word freezes in the struggle with its adversary. Others rise above any context and radiate in their irreplaceability.

This is not a case - as must be stressed - of mastering a foreign tongue at home, in a room, with a teacher, backed up by all the people who speak as one is accustomed to hearing in one’s own town, at all hours of the day. Actually, one is at the mercy of the foreign tongue in /its/ precinct, where all people are on its side, and together and with a semblance of legality, they smash in on one with their words, heedlessly, steadfastly, and incessantly. Furthermore, one knows one remains, one does not go back - not after a few weeks, not after months, not after years. Hence, it is crucial to understand everything one hears; that, as everyone knows, is the hardest thing at first. Then one keeps imitating until it too is understood. In addition, something happens in reference to the earlier language: one has to make sure it does not intrude at the wrong time. So it is gradually repressed, one encloses it, one propitiates it, one puts it on a leash; and as much as one secretly fondles and caresses it, in public it feels neglected and rejected. No wonder that it sometimes takes revenge and ambushes one with swarms of words, which remain isolated, do not join into any meaning, and whose onslaught would be so ludicrous for others that it merely forces one to be even more secretive.

It may seem highly inappropriate to make such an ado about these private linguistic situations. In a time when everything is getting more and more enigmatic, when the existence of not just individual groups but literally all mankind is at stake, when no decision turns out to be a solution, for there are too many mutually contradictory possibilities, and no one is capable of even sensing most of them, because too much is happening, and we find it out too soon, and before we have even grasped it, we are already finding out the next thing - in a time that is swift, menacing and rich, and developing more and more richly because of that menace, in such a time, if a man takes the liberty of thinking, one would expect something different from him than the tale of the agony of words, occurring independently of their meaning.

If, however, I /have/ said a little about that, then I owe you an explanation. It strikes me that today’s man, charged with more and more in his fascination with the universal, is seeking a private sphere, which is not unworthy of him, which is clearly distinct from the generality, yet is perfectly and more accurately reflected in it. What I mean is a kind of translation from one into the other, not a translation that one selects as a free game of the mind, but one that is both incessant and necessary, forced by the constellations of external life, and yet is more than a compulsion. For many years now, I have been involved in this translation; however, the private sphere in which I have settled now, albeit not comfortably, and in which things should be conscientious and responsible, is the German language. Whether I shall succeed in satisfying it in this fashion - I cannot say. But the honour which you have paid me today, and for which I thank you, is something that I shall take as a propitious omen that I might still succeed.

1969

presented by Cape Cultural Collective featuring Jitsvinger; Colony; Isaac Sikhakhane; Paula Akugizibwe; Khadija Heeger; Hannah Botsis; Baystars Entertainers; Ihlumelo Youth Organisation; Rustum August; Kurt Langeveld; Melody Shevlane; Nadia Petersen; Ikapa Dance Theatre; The Generics; Bienvenue Mambote & Sibhonda Wood

at the District Six Museum, 25A Buitenkant St, CBD. 7pm. Tel: 021 466 7200.

Lowave provides an insight into the vibrant world of contemporary artistic creation. The Lowave catalogue features artists with a background in video art, such as François Guiton, Zineb Sedira, HC Gilje, Mounir Fatmi and Triny Prada, experimental filmmakers such as Massimilian and Nina Breeder and Raqs Media Collective, literary filmmakers such as Francçoise Romand, avant-garde musicians such as Rodolphe Burger and Yoshishiro Hanno, and live performers such as Label Ombres, Yuki Kawamura and Project_Singe. Brought together under the Lowave label, these films resonate with each other. Trends are clearly visible in the skilled creativity which forms the foundation of Lowave’s catalogue: the simultaneous creation of both sound and image; the dissipation of the human form; the work on urban landscapes; political and regional subjects.

In addition to individual, monographic titles, the Lowave catalogue also features an important number of compilations, including Different Cinema, a collection of experimental film co-edited with the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Hors Pistes, co-produced with the Pompidou Center, Resistance[s] and Re:Frame, two collections of avant-garde Arab and Indian film and video art. A series of documentaries on art, artists at work, as well as portraits complete the label’s editorial selection.

lowave is here

According to Variety, the film starts shooting on 30 May in Johannesburg, Cape Town, the Transeki and Robben Island, where Winnie’s former husband, Nelson Mandela, was was incarcerated for 18 of his 27 years in prison.

The script is written by Roodt, Andre Pieterse and Paul L Johnson, based on Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob’s Winnie Mandela: A Life.

erbacce-press, Liverpool UK 2009

36 pp., $8.00

It’s holy. It’s blue as a bruise. It’s A.D. Winans at his best, so merged with Billie—her pain, her songs, her longing for love—that we feel their Oneness. Winans identifies with the Jazz saint’s ability to survive the worst in life, and remain committed only to her art.

These poems are hard as nails, but paradoxically smooth as honey because they are sprung from the depths of compassion, the poet’s great love of humanity—particularly the downtrodden, the abused, the outsider. His is a love so large that, like his heroine, Winans never finds an equal partner.

In much of his published work, for example, we discover that personal, sexual love is thwarted by fate. He loves, instead, the unknown suffering, the “huddled masses”. His idealistic longing is always disproportionate; nothing can fill the void that the Truth keeps on enlarging— people are not interested in their fellow men, not interested in seeing them as brothers and sisters, only as objects to be used, abused, and cast aside.

In “Jazz Angel” one of the most evocative poems in the collection, Winans relays what he discovers walking the streets of San Francisco. Delivering the poem like a detective’s report, the straight forwardness of the words eviscerates us:

She sits alone

In her small hotel room

Above the 222 Club

At Ellis and Eddy Streets

8 months pregnant

Forced to give head

For soup and bread…….

And after showing us the woman’s life, as if he was in her room himself, which perhaps he was, he writes:

She heads for the door

Hears the night manager whisper

“Whore.”

Suspended in silence

And grief

Floating face down

In the bowels

Of the American dream….

For Winans, the Jazz Era celebrated the sensitivity of souls who had no interest in superficial values. To him, Jazzers were what William Blake had described poets as, “fallen angels”. Billie Holiday was an alien in a world hooked into money and fame. And Winans who always worked at jobs to support his art never wanted to be part of any Gentleman’s Club. In “Post Office Reflections,” he notes:

Bone-ass tired from

Sorting thousands of letters

Fingers numb from stuffing

Them into pigeonholes

& I smelled of sweat and death

& kept drinking until

I felt good

Or ran out of money

Or both

& rode the 14 Mission Bus

Home with other people

Like me

Who couldn’t do

A nine-to-five shift…

Although Billie Holiday’s archangel wings got burned up in the fires of the country’s heartlessness, its racist Klanism, its failure to perceive women as equal to men, in her performances she was she able to fly. Winans empathizes with her yearning for salvation through freedom. Consequently, he has created this tribute, not only for “The Jazz Lady” (title of a poem dedicated to her); but he sings a sad farewell to the Blues as well. For example, in “The Demise of Jazz in North Beach,” he writes:

No cool cats in North Beach anymore

No cool cats blowing the horn

No jazz at the old Purple Onion

No be-bop snapping fingers

No fallen angels spreading their legs

On the way home after

A conversation with God

No black cats improvising the blues

No white dudes riding the midnight express

No stoned soul train musicians blowing

Mean clean notes crucified suffocating

In the smoking mirrors of the mind

Gone buried in the decadence

Of collective madness

It is easy to presume that literature plays something of a minor public role in a postcolonial context such as South Africa, and thereafter to assume that, within the domain of literature, the importance afforded poetry must be marginal. This has a degree of accuracy. In a relatively undeveloped publishing and reviewing environment, there is certainly a socially less “well-defined marginal position … (and) clear space” from which poets write than exists in metropolitan countries; a fact that causes local poets some despondency.[1] However, it can be suggested that one of the paradoxical consequences of this has been that poets regularly take on a social position that would be regarded as unusual in those developed countries where the relative autonomy of the “poetic space” is circumscribed by the expectations and pressures of the literature industry, which has in effect acted to limit the scope of poets’ role as active and meaningful social agents.

One of the most puzzling, if compelling, aspects of recent poetry in English in South Africa has been the way in which it has engaged with, reflected upon, and tried to influence ongoing processes in the country’s wider sociocultural and political life. Since liberation, it is apparent that private spaces have become more porous: and the traditional dividing line in South African poetry between private and public expression has been brought increasingly into question.[2] This has affected not only the nature of political poetry, but of less public genres as well.

Poets continue to involve themselves in public affairs, as they did before liberation. Many stalwarts of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), continue to act in the service of the state, and the policies of the party and its partners. Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, Minister of Housing from 1999-2003, has agonized over the work expected of her as a “soldier-poet”; poet Vusi Mavimbela (a long-time loyalist and confidant of former President Mbeki), appointed Director-General of the National Intelligence Agency in 1999, spoke out in the late 1990s in support of instituting economic policies for South Africa based on the model of the “Asian Tigers”; the current Treasurer of the ANC, Matthews Phosa, has published a book of Afrikaans poetry; ANC members Jeremy Cronin and Mongane Serote both served spells as Members of Parliament; Lindiwe Mabuza continues to write poetry even as she serves as a diplomat for the government in a variety of geographical locations, and so on.[3] Even among the younger poets this is the case, although the frequency seems to be diminishing. For instance, both Seitlhamo Motsapi and Lisa Combrink served as speech-writers for the Mbeki presidency, while Lance Mogorosi Nawa has spent time as the mayor of Mamelodi.

Examples of poetry’s reach abound. The first general elections served as a basis for many poems. So did the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with Ingrid de Kok in particular employing it as an enduring theme in her work. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) solved the dilemma of having only 20 minutes to put forward their perspective concerning the complicity of big business in apartheid at the TRC by using a poet, Nise Malange; and the most revered and emulated poet of the 1980s, ANC-aligned Mzwakhe Mbuli — later jailed for armed robbery — was praise singer at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 presidential inauguration, Master of Ceremonies at the re-launch of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) in 1995, the “singing spokesman” for the national railways for a period in the 1990s, and did a half-time show at the match at which the South African national soccer team became African Champions in 1996.[4] In the 1990s there was a flurry of publishing activity around poetry. A celebratory anthology of poetry and prose was issued at the presidential inauguration of Thabo Mbeki, and anthologies on matters of concern such as AIDS, women’s issues, poverty, and homelessness, or in praise of Nelson Mandela, saw the light of day.

To a limited extent, some of these visible effects can be attributed to the more public role afforded certain genres of poetry in African public life from pre-colonial times onwards. The traditional genre of izibongo/lithoko (praise singing) has taken on a new vitality. Yet especially noticeable at present is the manner in which the figure of “the poet” has become infused with huge ethical and ideological weight and potential. Among practitioners and audiences alike, poetry is repeatedly regarded as allowing access to a more sublime or insightful “truth” than political discourse, or even social analysis. Es’kia Mphahlele has argued that the African poet had come to function over the years as a prophetic figure; and this function appears to intermingle with congruent assumptions from the European Romantic tradition inherited through colonialism. Poetry is seen as an incisive discourse, potentially free of cant and deceit; while the figure of the poet is presented as a unique purveyor of authenticity; a visionary and purveyor of a “truth” — including social truths — invisible to others.[5] This assumption has become as prevalent in advertising and the media as in poetic circles.

This phenomenon occurs among public figures as well. Speaker for the House of Parliament and — more recently — Deputy President of the ANC Baleka Mbete opines that the “best compliment you can give me … is to tell me that I am a poet”; businessman Hermann Mashaba, winner of the 2004 Free Market Award, argues that the entrepreneur is “the poet of the private sector”; while a Premier of the Western Cape, bemoaning the lack of racial unity and interaction in his province, has recently suggested that “if we want the Western Cape to be a home for all, maybe we must ask our poets to pick up where we couldn’t. We need to usher in an era of our poets again.”[6] The list that could be made of such utterances is lengthy. Poets who otherwise position themselves in the body politic very differently have joined in the chorus. For instance, Pan-Africanist Motsapi proclaims that, in contradistinction to poetry, contemporary “politics, journalism, and advertising (are) … driven by passion for illusion, talent for obfuscation and predisposition to ostentation”; liberal poet Chris Mann believes the purpose of poetry is “to shake by the scruff of the neck all jargon, cant and doublespeak … the lie private, commercial or political”; while Lebogang Mashile, possibly the most popular of the younger generation of poets, says that poetry “demands my honesty. I cannot lie in a poem.”[7]

Nevertheless on closer scrutiny there is less agreement on the role of poetry than at first appears. On the one hand, a group of poets has, since 1994, become deeply involved in the enterprise of writing about, and encouraging, national reconstruction and nation-building in both articles and poems, and has seen this as best advanced through support of the ANC. In an article published on the ANC website, for instance, Nawa calls for the party to oversee the building of what he calls a “national patriotic culture” as a priority, and urges that such cultural planning should seek to ensure that all South Africans have access to cultural expression and activity via local government rather than treating culture “as a concurrent competence between national and provincial governments.”[8] Yet even among such poets close to the ruling bloc, there is by no means consensus about political, economic, and social issues, either in their pronouncements or in their poetry. Serote, for example, has adopted a consistently Africanist position and used his poetry to inveigh against the role he has had to play in government institutions promoting “reconciliation.” In his epic poem “Freedom, Lament and Song” he laments his position:

at the big house
at this HQ of God, Cape Town
I listen, I look, I touch
there are liars
cheats and betrayers
they manoeuvre
they are like vacuum cleaners
like hyenas
in their speeches[9]

Other poets within the Government alliance, most notably the South African Communist Party member Jeremy Cronin, have involved themselves in economic debate and critique; Cronin emerging as a vocal, and often critical, presence in the ANC-led alliance. He has written voluminously inter alia on the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and South African Reserve Bank; on the South African State’s post-1996 Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) economic policy; on the socialist pedigree of privatization policies in China; on the role of the new black middle class; and he has raised concern over the “ZANUfication” of the ANC and involved himself in many debates about strategy. He has also managed to be a loyal supporter of both Mbeki and, more recently, Jacob Zuma.[10] Similar critiques, from positions both to the right and left of Cronin, have been articulated in the period under discussion.[11]

Since the early 1990s there has been a movement among some poets away from any notion that poetry should be functional to politicians and their agendas. On returning from exile, Keorapetse Kgositsile (the present poet laureate) stressed that, while he still saw writing as a political activity, he was opposed to politicians determining what artists should produce; while later Lesego Rampolokeng voiced a similar sentiment when he suggested that the era of the “bring-on-the-poet-to-lick-the-stage-clean-for-the-politicians thing” had ended.[12] However, it is easy to become too optimistic about this development. The urge to use poetry merely to praise power has not vanished in the nearly two decades since liberation. Mabuza’s poetry in particular is in essence a paean of praise to party personalities, policy, and ideals, and the role of praise poetry in particular is open to becoming a vehicle for sycophancy. In a 2005 article, Limpopo activist and poet Vonani Bila speaks of

poets who are invited to most government and corporate functions. I’ve heard rumours they are paid extremely well. These poets, by nature, are opportunists. As long as they get paid and receive sufficient media coverage in the colours of the rainbow nation or Coca-Cola or Vodacom on Bafana Bafana, they are willing to suffocate the real voices within. You can call these clowns anything, but certainly not poets. The kind of content that characterizes their scribbling is inept human rights rhetoric, slogans about non-existent transformation and change, blind celebration of NEPAD and African Renaissance, and self-praise. Often they write about sex and are known for shouting women’s power. They call Biko, Hani and Sobukwe’s names without having read enough of the doctrines these fighters pursued in their lifetime.[13]

The evidence of this kind of lip service to past ideals and the struggle against poverty among poets who in fact are aligning themselves with South Africa’s present pro-corporate and wealth-friendly reality is noticeable. Indeed, the amount of poets willing to occupy this space has, arguably, grown apace in the new century — an issue which will be discussed later.

Throughout the period since liberation there have been poets, on the other hand, who have seen their utterances as fulfilling a critical purpose at odds with state or ruling party debates and policies. A number of prominent poets distance themselves from current government positions, most often on the left. Dennis Brutus, for example, an ongoing and vociferous critic of the role of the IMF and World Bank in global politics and of South Africa’s economic policies since liberation, inveighs against the new black elite who are

frustrating any efforts to achieve the kind of just society that they spoke about and if that’s not bad enough, worse is the fact that while they can see people living in poverty, near starvation, sickness without medical care, homelessness — they can live in disgusting affluence without a sense of guilt.[14]

Using a rather different conceptual approach and discourse, there are also poets (especially among the young) who have reacted with suspicion to what Ntone Edjabe, editor of the journal Chimurenga, describes as the puritanical culture of “don’ts” in some of Africa’s newly independent countries that are involved in “the dull enterprise of nation-building.”[15] Sharp criticism is, on occasion, aired as regards some of the most hallowed institutions of post-apartheid South Africa, including what Lesego Rampolokeng calls South Africa’s “malice-in-wonderland” Constitution (“Rap-Ranting”).

Since liberation a chorus of poems have emerged critical, at times harshly so, of the new generation of politicians, and the corruption and nepotism that has attended them. In the face of a media obsessed with icons and role-models, the trope of the “hero” has been subjected to scrutiny. In some cases, such as Chris Mann’s poem “Where is the Freedom For Which They Died?” the names of heroes and martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle are used as a comparative counterpoint to shame other South Africans involved in internecine conflict, family abuse and violence. In others — such as Karen Press’ “Tiresias in the City of Heroes”and Bila’s “Mandela, Have You Ever Wondered?” — heroes are shown to have feet of clay. These poems highlight the degree to which a country awash with nationalist rhetoric has accepted old habits that do not challenge people’s preconceptions of, or responses to, structures of power.

Any perusal of the poetry of Mbongeni Khumalo, Press, Motsapi, Bila, Rampolokeng, and many others shows a radical, critical spirit of enquiry at work. From this perspective, the duty of poetry is, according to Bila, “to ask embarrassing questions”; an attitude increasingly removed from the poets of the ruling order.[16] As Siphiwe ka Ngwenya states in “Killjoy”:

i see nothing fine
when the sun shines
i mock the poet singing praise in parliament
i cause a predicament
reveal poverty
in our liberty
I am killjoy
I am killjoy
Healing: Utopia and Reality

In the early years of his editorship, Robert Berold (editor of the poetry journal NewCoin between 1989-1999) speaks of receiving poems demonstrating “fragments of psyches … together presenting a picture of a traumatised disturbed society. … I began to realise that in a society like ours it is extremely difficult to distinguish between psychological and social manifestations.”[17] It is little wonder, therefore, that after liberation the poetry’s potential for exploring and processing psychological anguish has manifested itself, in terms that vary from the young poet Kabomo’s belief that he could “let the bullshit out on paper … (and) be more honest on paper than with my mother, my girlfriend, my best friend and even myself” to Berold’s more expansive belief that “writers who can bring the different fragments of reality together will have an important healing function.”[18]

A supplement to this desire for succor in writing or reading poetry is the fact that liberation in South Africa occasioned expectations that the future would be immeasurably better than the past. In a 1995 interview, Serote noted that “for a long time the two opposites, the ideal world and the real world, are going to form the basis of a very strong articulation on the part of writers”; while three years later Cronin suggested that “a relevant South African poetry should force the actual and the desirable into the same aesthetic, linguistic and subjective space,” adding that political themes in post-liberation poetry have turned to “grappling with the shortfall between post-apartheid aspirations and actual realities on the ground.”[19] In another version of this utopian urge, Bila called for “a new world of understanding and love” which, from his perspective, would be forged by “taking a journey through African mythology … crossing borders of cultural traditionalism and conditioning.”[20] For the last decade and a half, as a consequence, cheek-by-jowl with the optimism of government media statements (most immediately discernible in such tropes as the “rainbow nation” and “African Renaissance”) a series of poetic perceptions of the contemporary state of the country have emerged which claim to be closer to social reality, and which are a great deal darker. In Rustum Kozain’s “February Moon: Cape Town,” for example:

My land’s an expanse of rubble
and slogans, charters, accords.
Handshakes commit chattering guns
to obscenity and soap operas.
Every day, violence kitsches itself
onto front pages … .

Clearly, any closer analysis of how life is experienced in South Africa at present will magnify the huge discrepancies of wealth, education, and access to resources. Pertinent is the need to recognize a

lived world of a simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism … the social relations of space are experienced differently, and variously interpreted, by those holding different positions as part of it.[21]

For some poets, a particular focus on the quotidian both highlights the lack of political change and contains a longing for the desired transition to a better country. At its most extreme, this can be seen, for instance, in Tatamkhulu Afrika’s narrative poems of first-person liminal encounters and transactions with the social outcasts of Cape Town in minutely-drawn, deprived, and detritus-strewn inner cityscapes. Critics have regarded his work as a commentary on the Others of wealth and privilege, enacting “engagements with everyday existence … illuminating encounters that are rendered concretely and exactly while pointing to an unknown beyond themselves of which they may be said to be the astonished trace.”[22]

Politics also has a habit of irrupting into daily life through the ways in which the political and economic choices made by the political leadership limit and shape the boundaries of experienced life. In essence, to conceive of South Africa as a “normal” society now is as far-fetched as the prior pre-liberation dogma of apartheid’s supporters. One of the most enduring qualities at present seems to be an ambience of insecurity and instability. Kgositsile spoke on his return from exile of “a level of decay in the moral fibre of our society which, until now, could not have vaguely formed part of even my most bizarre nightmares.”[23] Press, in turn, notes:

Every map is out of date.
The roads go to unbuilt houses.

… Everyone gets a star.
Soon there’ll be none left.
You have to eat it; they aren’t for planting.

Put up a mirror where you are
and make yourself at home in your familiar eyes.
Outside the wind blew it all away.

(“Reclaiming Our Land”)

Rather than the triumphal march into the future beloved by nationalist discourse, time is at worst experienced by many South Africans as circular, as promises made never seem to be carried further and — on a national level — social betterment is painfully slow, and experienced by some — especially the poorest and most marginalized — as non-existent. Promises about bread rarely turn into bread. Conversely, therefore, “Things stand still here, / where everything is always / moving … / There is no place for history. / We are glutted with words” (Ian Tromp, “Durban”). What is equally clear, though, is that the changed political landscape has made the desire for “normalcy” a site of undeniable, potentially explosive, demand.[24] Mxolisi Nyezwa, poet and editor of the literary magazine Kotaz, suggests:

writing must remember that something always happens. All the time. … A poem tries to capture a watery history — a transient memory. What makes the load heavy for many is this seamless vacuity, the emptiness of life — and the ceaseless lies. Literature grounds down this vacuous history to manageable forms. Something that even the guy in the street can dig and begin to understand.[25]

In a historical scenario where being black (in particular) has previously been experienced as a regimented, cramped, and policed experience — not only politically but spatially — a re-examination of local quotidian experience remains important: especially in terms which can gauge the degree to which this has changed, if at all. Some poets focus on the disconnected reality in which most South Africans live, where “it’s a civil struggle / to make sense of it” (Joan Metelerkamp, “Mother”); others seek to defamiliarize the everyday, as a means to revolutionize subjectivities that have become oppressed by the familiar and humdrum. This is certainly the case for a number of female poets. Implicitly, the task of the poet is to try and stay true to the ideal, even whilst focusing on its opposite: thereby seeking out and uttering what is at present obscured by the deceptive surface and self-interest of official public pronouncements. As Motsapi puts it:

all day
I sit under my armpit
& break stones

all day i sit
& break stones
with my teeth

all day i sit
& break stones
so that songs
may haul down
the sky

(“seben”)
The Tasks Given Subjectivity

There can be no doubt that colonialism and apartheid in South Africa significantly stunted the full expression of humanity among both black and white. There can be little doubt either that liberation in South Africa has shifted the borders of what is acceptable and possible, in explorations of the self in relation to society. Many writers, including poets, took Albie Sachs’ 1989 attack on “solidarity literature” as a signal for a fresh approach.[26] At best, this allowed poetry to deal with personal issues in ways which challenge existing societal norms and open up fresh spheres of contemplation and, perhaps, activism, as can be seen in a recent poem by Hale Tsehlana:

I write to untie the knots
that lump my throat
and turn into splitting headaches
when I could simply say fuck off but can’t
because I am an African woman
and my mouth must not be foul.
I write to wipe the tears
as the pages of pain
scroll from my thumbs
smudging my mascara.
I write myself into time.
I write that they may know
I became even stronger
when my heart was broken
by culture, church,
civilization
even
syphilization.
I write to share with you the quiet
revolution raging inside my brain …

(“I write to …”)

However, it is unclear the degree to which the emphasis on subjectivity in contemporary South African literature has widened the parameters of personal expression; when, in some instances, there is an inclination to use literature to refurbish traditional notions of “the individual” and compartmentalize subjective experience into emotional and social categories divorced from the social.

Liberation saw a reiteration, among more conservative and liberal poets, of the model of the discrete individual of liberal theorizing. This was combined with a notion that poetry should act as a bulwark against political, or public, demands. The Johannesburg poet Lionel Abrahams praised the vision of those white liberals of the past who “chose a solution that relied on gradual moral and philosophical transformation within the will of individuals.”[27] From this viewpoint, the individual poet should eschew what Cape Town poet Stephen Watson calls “any position of subservience to history.”[28] The poet is seen as a watchdog against “social engineering” or any invasion of politics or public discourse into personal space. In such a view poetry, especially lyric poetry, is a means of preserving and expressing a non-reducible “inner life,” and sensitizing individuals through acts of communication between writer and reader.[29] Poetry is perceived as indirectly serving the same mooted cause as liberal politics; to “serve the well-being of one’s fellow creatures” based on the grounds of one’s own “artistic integrity.” Abrahams is a remarkably candid example of the contradictions of contemporary South African liberals’ self-image: a self-abnegation hand in hand with a somewhat patronizing certainty in the ultimate rectitude of their ideological position. He makes clear the role each liberal follower — including each writer — bears in this:

The more developed — that is to say the more individualised the identity, the more significant the identification. … [S]olidarity on the one hand and the imaginative act of human identification on the other requires entirely different things of the self … . This difference accounts for the human and aesthetic poverty of so much political writing: it addresses itself not outwards to the unpredictable heart of the stranger who is your other self … . But there is the other side. The opening of our society lends a new urgency to the maintenance of our standards as individuals and as bearers of our inherited culture … . We have to guard our own, not against others but, in the first place, for ourselves, and, in the second place, for others, our compatriots, against the time when, if ever, they may choose to share it, for the future of the land.[30]

Of course, the emphasis on poetry as a means of communication and shared empathy between the “human natures” of individual addresser and addressee is nothing new: and, in the absence of any questioning of the terms employed, bids fair to end as merely an acknowledgment of the astonishing diversity of a mildly differentiated humanity. Nowadays, the type of lyrical poetry favored by the white academy in South Africa in the past — marked by a rather defensive and inward-looking response to social issues — is taking a great deal of strain, and is tending to demonstrate this in themes of avoidance, violation, and fear. It is by no means clear how this kind of subjectivity can act as a point of reference and model for the wider social canvas of South Africa.

A number of South Africa’s presently most highly regarded poets outside the liberal paradigm are nonetheless now seen by reviewers in similar terms to what has been outlined above; and this, it can be argued, is a reductive commentary on the salience of their work. For example, Shaun de Waal, long-standing books editor of the Mail & Guardian, describes one of de Kok’s volumes as follows:

Empathy and compassion are the keynotes in poems such as these, in which the poem is a way of meeting, treating, and in some way internalising the words and worlds of others … one that speaks to and of common humanity … .[31]

A number of poets — including some of the more fêted younger poets — have made similar pronouncements about the modus operandi of their work. “When I stand on the stage I see you on the page, I write on you, I write on your heart, on your spirit, on your ear” remarks Lebo Mashile, speaking of the manner in which she sees her relationship to members of her audience; while Gabeba Baderoon’s perception are similar. As an interviewer reports:

Readings, she says, teach her about her own poems, a quest for an intimate and “naked” exchange. After a poem is published, Baderoon says, “I learn it for the first time by how it feels reflected on someone else’s eyes.”[32]

As it is safe to say that published poetry at least in South Africa is still the domain of better-educated and middle-class individuals, the “human” concerns of their poems tend to be inflected with unconscious expressions and perceptions of privilege and class. Whether defined socially, politically or psychologically, the viewpoints of the socially marginalized are in danger of either being patronized or ignored. The poet Dineo Mosiane confronts this conundrum when she says, “the deep thoughts the one ‘in need’ falls into are much deeper than of those who have all they want”;[33] while Nyezwa (somewhat idealistically) exhibits a similar belief, suggesting that the “most afflicted people will always hold the dearest poetry. There’s a … relationship between affliction and the ability to speak the truth.”[34]

Allan Kolski Horwitz of the Johannesburg poetry group the Botsotso Jesters was less sanguine in a 1998 interview, observing that “it’s a time of individualism, a time when people are out for themselves … . It’s a corporate world now.”[35] From this perspective, as private life becomes more and more regulated and fashioned by the economic forces of late capitalism, “innerness” bids fair to become a commodity to be solicited and sold like any other. This is equally true of displays of “innerness” and uniqueness in poets’ self-fashioning. In such a scenario, Berold believes that the “struggle now is to tell the truth, to resist being turned from human beings into consumers”; while Cronin insists that “in poetry, the construction of the ‘I’ is part of the political argument.”[36]
Subjectivity and the Yearning to Belong

If there is one theme that seems to unite many poets of different persuasions at present, it is that of the individual in search of his or her putative identity. Historically, both apartheid and its opponents came to reduce the diversity of South African population into the confines of four essential races (or “four nations”), even as apartheid, for its own purposes, both emphasized and fossilized Africans’ division into separate ethnic groups. Mirroring debates in a wider South African intellectual context, expressions of identity among poets tend to vacillate wildly between those intent on stressing the hybrid nature of South Africans, and those who articulate their essential sense of belonging inside a group, however this is defined. Some poets can be seen to imbricate these potentially contradictory urges within a sense of personal identity.

At present there are powerful discourses at work, disseminated most obviously through the commercial and state media, which emphasize explorations of the self in search of a “true” identity (generally marshaled racially). It is clear that in the topography of South African identity formation there are many — and this is not simply related to those who agree with state and media discourse on the subject — who wish to use notions of authenticity and cultural or racial knowledge. Some poets (Dikobe wa Mogale is an early example) stress the politics of their art as a response to an ongoing racial divide between white and black based on privilege and access to resources. For Mogale, the “slogan that ‘art is a weapon of struggle’ will be valid and sound as long as there are still two contending cultures, namely the cultures of the oppressor and oppressed”; while more recently Bila among others has insisted that the black/white divide remains strong, while refuting any suggestion that whites or blacks are a homogeneous group.[37] Some poets — Mzi Mahhola is the most vocal of these — are concerned about the loss of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge and expression in a rapidly modernizing nation, and the implications this holds for the future.[38]

Mahola’s poetry gives space to themes surrounding growing up in a rural community in the Eastern Cape. Other poets have involved themselves in a searching for “roots” through poetry, reaching back to what they believe will be a more authentic identity based on the retrieval of value systems ravaged by colonialism. This kind of poetry tends to combine castigations of present global and local inequalities with invocations of iconic figures from the history of the colonized, in poems which vary from superficial hagiography to insightful analyses of the connection of past injustices to present inequalities.

In her “A Poem for Sarah Baartman,” Diana Ferrus (who claims Khoisan descent) addresses the slave woman taken from the Cape and exhibited as a “freak” and “scientific curiosity” in Europe two hundred years ago because of her steatopygia. The poem, recited at the time of the return of Baartman’s remains from a European museum and their reburial in the Eastern Cape, can be found on official websites, as well as those promoting tourism.[39] In many ways it is exemplary of South African official ideology in its current phase: natural landscape (symbolically deployed and romantically depicted) is linked to identity, and identity seen in terms of images of origin and the legitimacy of one’s possession of “the land.” The last line of the poem is remarkably candid in demonstrating that what is finally at stake, in poems such as this, is the usage to which they are put in journeys of self-fashioning and self-discovery:

I’ve come to take you home -
home, remember the veld?
The lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
… I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckles sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wrench you away -
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit

… I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palm of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you …
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.

There are other voices that explore similar terrain, but use markedly different modes of perception and utterance. The work of Motsapi, for instance, mobilizes and employs a range of references embodying exemplary values seen to inhere in symbolic polities or figures (such as pre-colonial African kingdoms and contemporary African-American jazz musicians) in order to make statements about contemporary African realities. Through these means he constructs a poetry that “resists a global network of oppression involving the whole range of Euro-American epistemological and physical domination of the globe stretching from Columbus’s voyages to the I.M.F.,”[40] simultaneously making ironic commentary — often through neologisms and portmanteau words — about those elements of African and diasporic black culture and behavior he believes have become prey to an anaesthetizing global culture of consumerism and consequent inauthentic notions of self:

what shad / what shadow
takes over the land so

… i’ve known you so
with receding suns & invading sands
no calm but the ominous violin
of incessant flies
your history a knot of storms
reprobate seers & hip healers
the speak / speed of yr drums
now drowned to a croak
by the convenient noises
of popular music

i’ve known you so
seed left too long
in the sun
an eventual death
in the refugee camps
cos we sd no
to the scum of politricks

… only de poor suffer
only de poor suffer.

(“drum intervention”)

At worst, the poetry of identity formation can be said to have become pronouncedly fashionable, and this tendency does have its critics. Press observes:

The interface between people’s psychological collaboration in identities and the fact that identities are created by social means, is not innate. … I don’t pretend for a moment that they don’t exist in the daily texture of people’s lives. But they are not the defining moments of reality for people: I think poverty, hunger, loneliness are just as strong … [41]

while Ari Sitas voices a determination to struggle against the false “new tribalisms (that) are being remembered and reinvented.”[42] Indeed, there are poets who question any easy correlation made between race and class. Even as he gives expression to a political poetry highlighting the inequalities surrounding race under global capitalism, Rampolokeng, for one, notes that “one weakness of our past political engagements was the way apartheid made us posit everything on a racial basis — when everyone knows that the class thing was lurking there and was far more threatening.”[43]

In such a complex scenario, it is premature to claim that

the advent of majority rule produced a cultural situation in which the divided aesthetics of the past were rendered obsolete … narratives of the racial Other, which inform colonial writing, or of the oppressed Self in the writing of the colonised, are no longer possible in stories of social actuality.[44]

Nonetheless, many contemporary poets, both white and black, have sought to explore new and interstitial spaces of identity, and express experiences more hybrid than has traditionally been allowed for. Goodenough Mashego, for instance, sees the challenge for South African poets as finding ways “to position themselves to a point where they cannot be black/white/coloured or Indian but poets.”[45] The result has been, at best, poetry of a rich complexity. One of the most delightful examples is Johannesburg poet Immanuel Suttner’s appropriation of rastafarian discourse to comment on his white, Jewish roots:

Um yisrael wen ‘cross to babylon
started callin hisself irwin cohn
writin for de newspaper in washinton
bin nice n pleasant to everyone

or got hasidic in ol new york
bowin to de hot air in de rabbi’s talk
dancin to de beet of de fals messiah stalk
dey say he gonna come if we stay away from pork

me i say me eyes is full o sand
i gotta smash de idols bilt by de fader’s hand
like trotsky done or like avram’s stand
and bild mehself meh own promise land

(“De tetrach hammer”)
Democracy and the “Rainbow Nation”

Since liberation, South Africa has been configured in media and politicians’ pronouncements as a “rainbow nation”: a conglomeration of different races, cultures and persuasions living in harmony and equality. In concord with this, a multiplicity of voices, interpretations and “stories” are now celebrated in literary forums. Yet the social reality is less ideal. What is less scrutinized is the manner in which this diversity relates to harder political questions, where the challenge facing South Africans remains, in Cronin’s words, “how to forge some kind of national unity, shared space … and yet sustain plurality, diversity, debate.”[46]

At the moment, such celebration is almost always linked with a promotion of political pluralism, conceived to work in much the same style as it has always functioned in the capitalist state. If taken into the realm of identity and culture, such pluralism is often idealistically portrayed, as in Mabuza’s “Today You Are Not Well”:

We must also borrow
From the rainbow
Such heat, such energy such cleansing water
And judge just so much that we may
Fuse them into finest colours
And splash them across the sky

Yet what precisely this “rainbow” consists of, or should consist of, remains open to disagreement. Chris Mann, Grahamstown poet and stated opponent of South Africa’s “endemic yobbo and shebeen cultures,” uses up one whole book explicitly trying to embody the “rainbow nation.” In a series of poems collected together in South Africans: A Set of Portrait Poems, individual (and, presumably, exemplary) individuals from different origins and backgrounds are described against the social backdrop of the country around the time of the first elections. Thus, according to its blurb, the book provides a “series of portraits of people as individuals and in groups of individuals … a glimpse of the astonishing diversity of the people who are South Africans.”[47] The work is strongly imbued with — and the individuals who are subjects of poems tested against — liberal values. For Mann:

Business and political leaders in the new South Africa are living in an intellectual climate not unlike that of the Renaissance. The Medicis were part of a rising business class that cast aside the despotism of the medieval church and rediscovered their potential as humans. Many new South Africans, both black and white, are thrusting aside the despotism of apartheid, tribalism and Marxism and finding fresh creative energies.[48]

While intellectuals honor the emergence of hybrid subjectivity, the advertising of South Africa as a “rainbow nation” (with its overtones of mutual acceptance and accommodation) gives a falsely optimistic picture of how differences are experienced and negotiated — or not negotiated — on the ground, in a scenario where disparities of wealth and competition over limited resources can become, literally, deathly. Horwitz notes that, as far as the rainbow nation is concerned, “in the absence of broader political direction it is left to advertising literally to create the new culture … it’s going to be a disaster because it’s superficial.”[49] Often a facile pluralism is assumed, where the individuals who emerge from different languages and cultures are regarded as now meeting on an equal footing, with scant regard for past or present inequalities. The individual is unproblematically placed within a “race” or “culture”; and literature is assumed to act out an embodiment, in diverse forms, of communication between individuals thus placed. This is in sharp contrast to poets like Rampolokeng or Motsapi, who illustrate how the “human” is a space intersected by material constraints and subject to the manipulations of the powerful: a world which, according to Rampolokeng, makes “humanity a stool / between parted buttocks of international conspiracy” (“Broederbondage”); where “death is the coldest currency / … it foreign exchanges in the silence of finance’s terms / dictates of THE NEW VAMPIRES” (“the tosh song trilogy”).

Thus, while it is apposite to say that current struggles in South Africa are “emblematic of broader human issues,” as Cronin does, his proviso that “we live in a world dominated by (capitalism) and far from solving the universal human problem, it is deeply aggravating them” is equally important.[50] At the moment, the individual’s ability to find fulfillment or to act in any fully human way is curtailed by social and economic forces outside his or her control, and often globally distant. As Roshila Nair notes:

love still finds me here
in the post-colonial hour,
here
among the politics of viruses
and neo-liberal economic policies,
here among the grand things
that have curled around us
and sprouted wings
like god’s heavenly creatures
vainly trying to transport us to paradise
here in Fanon’s no-man’s land
we are beginning to learn
how to make everything
out of nothing again.

(“Fanon’s land”)
The New Century: Poetry as State Asset

In the last two decades, youth culture in South Africa is being reformulated in ways that are at times difficult for older generations (including older generations of writers and poets) to understand or evaluate.[51] In a recent article on youth culture in contemporary Johannesburg, Sarah Nuttall tries to follow through some of the borrowings, interstices and intersections of the “loxion culcha” (location culture) of trendy black youth, through expressive and aesthetic choices such as fashion, music, magazines, and argot. With clear allegiances to musical forms such as rap, she suggests that this culture has a simultaneously admiring and parodic stance vis-à-visAfrican-American culture, where a “cut-and-paste appropriation of American music, language, and cultural practices is simultaneously deployed and refuted.”[52]

As has happened in the U.S. and Europe — and, indeed, is happening elsewhere in Africa — the intermingling of poetry and musical forms and lyrics has resulted in an upsurge of “spoken word” and slam poetry, as well as poetry associated with hip-hop artists and their music. Garvey Ite notes:

Call it celestial intervention or the need to add more spiritual aspects to entertainment, or something more tangible, like hip-hop trying to retrace its steps. Whatever the case, poets are crawling out of every corner of urban landscapes, holding phallic pens to challenge skyscrapers. … Jazz joints, college campuses, art galleries and quaint restaurants have been invaded. Those left out of the loop are scrambling to be invaded. It has become survival of the fittest — even for the word.[53]

Concomitant to this is a growing use of technology in poetry, both in performance and via the use of the internet, even among those poets — such as Nyezwa, Rampolokeng and Motsapi — who have on occasion criticized its dominance. The seminal importance of the “Word of Mouth” radio program initially hosted by Mvulane Mnisi (a.k.a. Rudeboy Paul) on Yfm Radio in spreading access to, and popularizing, poetry since 2003 is noteworthy.[54]

In such a scenario, there has been a certain amount of concern expressed — inter alia among older poets, writers, and cultural critics — about the American influence visible in this culture, as well as the seeming loss of political awareness or interest among the youth.[55] Indeed, it may be true that a type of youth culture and a constituent layer of younger poets have emerged unconcerned with politics in any form, as Nuttall indicates. This is however not borne out by the evidence in any general sense. Generalizations such as Matthew Krouse’s that “gone is the poetry of political opposition. More and more writers tend towards a poetry of personal mystery” are exaggerated; for there is still a widespread belief, as the younger Gauteng poet Maakomele Manaka points out, that “we all have a message to do.”[56] Many, like Manaka, still hold fast to the possibility that they speak for a wider constituency.

It is daunting to try and delineate the contradictory aspects of current social and political awareness among poets. Mashile, presenter of the television program L’atitude and the first South African poet to win the Noma Award since Serote in 1993, says “The poet serves struggle to the minds of the people / Like fresh fruit to their mouths / Where poetry is sustenance / We grow strong” (“Poetry Africa, 2004”). Nevertheless, as in the past, there are divergent conceptions of what “sustenance” — or, indeed, “struggle” — in the present South African context means. Mashile herself observes that growing up as the child of exile parents in Providence means that she now has to negotiate “being too African for America, being too American for Africa.”[57] An iconic figure for a younger generation of urban, self-assertive, upwardly-mobile black women, Mashile constantly voices a poetry that demands gender and racial equality and awareness, and has not been reticent in appearing on public and institutional platforms. She has performed at the inauguration of President Thabo Mbeki, been a guest speaker on MTV Base alongside Tony Blair, and has been named one of South Africa’s “most awesome women” by the South African edition of Cosmopolitan magazine.[58]

Despite its socially-minded impetus, at worst some of the poetry emerging from this trend approaches social and, specifically, women’s issues through a rubric of slogans, clichés and a discourse of self-improvement not unlike that of Oprah- and Cosmo-speak. One need only quote from Mashile’s “Sisters”:

I see the wisdom of eternities
In ample thighs
Belying their presence as adornments
To the temples of my sisters
Old souls breathe
In the comfort of chocolate thickness
That suffocates Africa’s angels
Who dance to the rhythm
Of the universe’s womb
Though they cannot feel
Its origins in their veins

… I pray to the voices
That whisper in my soft curves
For the lionesses of my blood
To hear the songs of the cool reeds

It is unclear the extent to which “loxion culcha” emanates from actual townships or “locations.” There are indications even in Nuttall that it is more often than not the creation of a better-educated urban stratum who are striving to establish and authenticate a new, self-knowingly hybrid, version of African identity. At the same time, it is clear that certain forms of identity are regarded as more authentic than others, with “Africa” an enduring lodestone of values. Thus Kgafela oa Magogodi, in his poem “bohemia,” excoriates the kind of person who

somersaults
in its mother’s womb
pops out feet first
no labour pains
… it skips the nappy
for a pair of jeans
it suckles
from a pint of beer
… it is zimzim come to jozi
… it is chasing fame
in rocky street
it is not foolish
just learnt
to speak pure english
thru blocked nose[59]

To some extent, the fascination with fashion, technology, and other alluring forms of expression leads to some peculiar results, such as the appearance in a magazine fashion shoot of the politically-outspoken poet Righteous the Common Man.[60] In the face of this, it is sometimes hard to register or understand all the different qualities the profile of “the poet” may signify to its users. Suffice it to say that this type of positioning by poets has brought a degree of criticism, even from their peers: Mbongeni Khumalo, for one, ironically comments: “I pay tribute to the writers / For misleading the people / Into fantasies” (“Tribute”).

Nevertheless, in all forms of poetry there are those who continue to express themselves critically and openly about the social ills of South Africa, and the complacency among some of the youth. This can be seen not only on the printed page but among some of those who span the gap between poetry and hip-hop culture and music. Marlon Burgess, for example, also works as M.C. CaCo; and his poetry provides incisive commentary on sociopolitical issues, consumer culture, and the emergent political leadership:

We were in bondage
now we are worse than we ever were.
We keep ourselves afloat on a very thin dream
Celebrating ten years of de”mock”racy
And we thought our liberation was from racism?
We’re all in a cell we can’t see
As Isidingo snatches at Generations of those who owned the
mines
Wah wah revolution
Wah wah revolution
It must be kak confusing
From being abused to doing the abusing.[61]

Some hip-hop groups and artists, such as Tumi and the Volume, Hymphatic Tabs, and the all-women group Goddessa, also strike similar attitudes.[62] Protests at social conditions frequently segue into entreaties towards the need for activism. Cape Town poet Khadija Heeger urges:

can you ask why we sit around clamouring to be just like the
picture of whitey
I’m talking about material economy and how it’s used you see
… I just keep hearing, what’s that you’re saying, “it’s because I’m
black you see!”
no I don’t
ah but that’s the famous copout for the dropout for the victim
and though its true
there is still no excuse for you to think that makes up for exemption
from your own redemption
… are you ready to ask why, why not,
why you why me
why not change why not change …

(“Black label”)[63]

On the other hand, there is evidence that poetry is increasingly being viewed as a useful medium by both state and big business. Some of the older poets who emerged just before or just after liberation have alluded to this new trend in less than flattering terms: Rampolokeng, for example, is somewhat testy about its consequences (“now poetry is beauty pageant / jump the class fence & land in affluence / but what lies beyond the prettiness of the performance / when gangrene sets in after the applause?” [“Talking prose”]). Poetry is being put to use to attract a younger generation of South Africans to support and participate in business ventures. For example, oil company SASOL’s 10 percent equity ownership transaction Inzalo, which offered 19 million ordinary shares in SASOL to black people, featured prominent poets as part of their promotion drive. The SASOL group brand manager explains:

The team … looked for a contemporary, powerful way to engage people emotionally …. The result was a campaign that relied on spoken word poetry and poster artwork. Designed to look nothing like traditional advertising, the theme of “a new beginning” was expressed using poetry and art from local poets Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile and Mac Manaka. Each poet recited their poetry in ten second television commercials and radio spots.[64]

The view that poetry is a tool to bring about political effects endures. The Lentswe Poetry Project, an initiative launched in 2005 with the assistance and backing of the television channel SABC2 as well as a number of poets such as Antjie Krog and Masoja Msiza, is an example of a poetry mobilized to underwrite versions of citizenship in congruence with the present government’s version of national identity and priorities. Set up, according to Msiza, because “in order for us to be successful as a nation, we need to know who we are as a people. We must learn about our heroes,” poetry was chosen as a medium especially suited to the purpose, because it is “the only form of art that is so easy, because you can do it as an individual.”[65] Lentswe has run competitions and workshops, poetry cafes, roadshows for poetry competitions, television platform, and prizes. Aimed, in the words of the television sponsor, to “stimulate the nation’s poetic side,” one of the earliest competitions challenged poets to write poems on the theme of national holidays:

As a proud supporter of the arts, SABC2 seeks to stimulate the nation using this fresh, interactive development. Creative Africans with a penchant for dabbling in words are encouraged to submit their poems, which will be broadcast on the channel. … The channel believes that through the Lentswe Poetry Project, we can build a more inspired, motivated and culturally aware nation.[66]

Generally speaking, nowadays a plethora of festivals and prizes has emerged aimed at rewarding the utterance of poets, and poetry is a presence on radio and television. The question one must ask of this is (as it always is) what kinds of utterances are rewarded. There is a discernible tendency by organs of the state and big business to turn to poetry in order to communicate marketing and political messages, as well as helping shape the subjectivity of the “ideal individual” required by the nation state and by capitalism.

The lyric poem in particular can be a powerful tool for implicitly modeling and shaping individual subjectivity, and hence social behavior. The crucial question, consequently, is the relation of this desired subjectivity to social issues in the country. In such an ambience, poetry may serve to play out versions of the “model citizen” required by the State in its current phase of transition and change; a transition that needs to build willing participants who know not only what should be changed, but what should not: in other words, encourage a literature which will foreground some social and individual desires and concerns, and be silent about others. This builds on the conviction, visible for much of South African history — especially the history of people striving for education and betterment — that literature (“the book”) is a considerable tool for self-improvement. Even Kgositsile, who had on his return from exile distanced himself from the notion that poetry should be functional to politics, is prepared to urge audiences in specific instances to “buy this book if you want to become a better person.”[67] In addition, this exemplary function seems to have occasioned an increasing emphasis on more traditional forms of lyrical poetry, as against the formal explorations of the 1990s. As early as 1993 Donald Parenzee warned that “Someone’s cutting off the rough edges of the struggle, / making a smoothly sinuous public edifice / … Soon we’ll be able to visit the gallery / And pour our anger into erudite forms …” (“Artifice”), and this tendency is becoming more apparent in the ways in which current poetry is being evaluated and reviewed.

The issue here could be put more starkly: poetry is being imbued with demands which are simply new versions of the “solidarity literature” regarded as outdated after liberation, albeit in a less obvious form.[68] As Sandile Ngidi notes in his poem “But Nations Love Their Poets”:

freedom has come my friend
you are now truly free
to write and sing as your heart pleases
now pursue art for art’s sake

… it’s that age for your rage to be tamed
your tongue can do with some English manners
we no longer need your song friend
your slogans have no place in freedom square
… discard nostalgic fantasies about beloved Africa
now the future is oily bright and as shiny as gold

… no! my friend, no shouting now
for God’s sake be reasonable now
no! you can’t jump the queue
send me a proposal first
but my hands are tied … .

Reading contemporary South African poetry, one is left with a vertiginous sense of the contradictions of a country which is — to use the words of Achille Mbembe in a different context — “constructing itself out of heterogeneous fragments and fortuitous juxtapositions of images, memories, citations, and allusions drawn from its splintered histories.”[69] The problem, of course, is that the ideological and expressive baggage residing in these “splintered histories” does not seem to want to go away; certainly not merely through the promptings of imaginative literature written or otherwise disseminated by an educated stratum.
Conclusion: W(h)ither South African Poetry?

In South Africa poetry has become a minor, but illustrative, site of disagreement over political, social, and psychological issues, as well as aesthetic and evaluative criteria. A potent ideological function still resides in the country’s poetry after liberation: and the ceaseless reiteration of “rainbow nation” clichés and celebrations of expressive freedom by critics mask the fact that there are powerful forces at work seeking to utilize the medium for a new hegemony in favor of the present ruling classes and their sanitized versions of individual subjectivity and cultural, as well as national, identity. It is possible to see contemporary events in poetry in optimistic terms, and stress its burgeoning use, and the many different interest groups and taste cultures that have been drawn to it. Some critics and poets — Baderoon would be the most vocal of these — are consistently optimistic about the current expansion of South African poetry in English, articulating a sense of energy and confidence in the burgeoning of the medium, while nevertheless pointing out some of its problems.[70] Others, though, inject a warning, at times pessimistic, note. Rampolokeng caustically wonders whether “we’re once more doing a monkey dance for colonialism”;[71] while Horwitz suggests that in South Africa

poetry won’t ever die but at the moment we don’t live in a time when there’s clarity, when there is a clear direction. It’s a time of individualism … the sense of solidarity has broken down completely. There always were opportunists, but now it’s very open and unashamed. … No doubt our arts will reflect that… .[72]

Perhaps the clearest reflection of this kind of anxiety is present in Sitas’ bitter prose poem “Lament for the dying of the word,” which describes the funeral of “a poetess who died”: someone who seems to symbolize literary and political values which the poet suggests are under threat in contemporary South Africa:

Her latest poetry book reviews itself. It is a hesitant and reflective account of recent declarations from critics who own the means of persuasion: apparently they had persuaded somebody, somewhere, that work like hers was out of joint with these times.

… One hundred cellphones ring in tandem. They all echo, like some epiphany, the voice of Mzwakhe Mbuli singing about peace in KwaZulu Natal.

… An imbongi bursts through the crowds orating in a language no one remembers.

… A slogan sings itself. To infinity.

this article first published by meditationsjournal.org

Brilliant military strategist, charismatic leader, and a true Warrior Queen, all of these terms aptly describe the remarkable character of Queen Nzingha of Angola.

Nzingha’s rise to power occurred during the early 17th century in the kingdom of Ndongo, which is now the present day country of Angola, in South West Africa. She lived during a period when the Atlantic slave trade was steadily growing, a time marked by the increased intensity of slave trading and consolidation of power by the Portuguese in her region. Portugal had been a presence in Angola since the early 16th century.

Starting with the forts they built along the coastline, the Portuguese gradually expanded their territory, as well as their control of the slave trade. They were able to do so by forming alliances with various local chiefs who supplied them with slaves in exchange for guns and other material items. One of these slave-trading chiefs was the King of Ndongo himself, Nzingha’s own brother.

Nzingha had strongly opposed her brother’s participation in the slave trade. However, it was not until the Portuguese traders began to make heavier demands on the King for slaves, thereby reducing his own profit from the trade, that he decided to resist and declare war. The war between the Portuguese, and the Ndongo people lasted for several years until the Portuguese decided that a peace conference would be held for both sides to negotiate an end to the war. It was at this conference that Nzingha would display her immense pride, determination, and iron will, traits that the Portuguese would be forced to reckon with for the next thirty years.

The conference was held in the city of Luanda in 1622. Nzingha, though not yet Queen, was the most ablest and uncompromising member of the royal delegate sent to represent the King. Despite the alleged purpose of the conference, to negotiate peace, the racist attitudes of the Portuguese were in full display. The governor only provided chairs in the conference room for himself and his councilors, in an attempt to force the future Queen to stand humbly before his presence. Nzingha and her people were unfazed by the governor’s arrogance. Her attendants promptly rolled out the royal carpet for Nzingha, and then one of them went down on all fours and formed himself into a human throne for her to sit on.

It was a move that spoke volumes not only about the fierce, and unbreakable spirit that she possessed, but also about the tremendous respect and devotion that her people had for her.

In 1623, after the death of her brother, Nzingha became the Queen of Ndongo.

The Portuguese had not respected the peace treaty signed at Luanda the year before, as they had continued their slave trading operations in Ndongo. Her first major move as Queen was to deliver an ultimatum to the Portuguese, demanding that they respect the terms of the treaty or else war would be declared. The Portuguese ignored her warning and so in that same year Nzingha went to war with them and commandeered a series of devastating strikes, defeating them in many battles.

Nzingha was an incredibly strong and charismatic woman. She was dearly loved by the people of Ndongo, able to rally masses of them to listen to her messages. A brave general, she was known to personally lead her troops into battle, and she forbade her subjects to call her “Queen” preferring the masculine title of King. Yet her aggressive traits were balanced by her charming and engaging personality, which she used to her own advantages when forming alliances with other kingdoms.

So clever was the Queen that she was able to take advantage of the Dutch arrival in Angola and form an alliance with them against the Portuguese. Certainly, the Dutch were not there as liberators of the Africans, they were merely competing against Portugal for a greater share of the slave trade. Still, Nzingha was wise enough to side with the foreigners to suit her own needs, a tactic she would use later on in her life by pretending to adopt Christianity.

One of Nzingha’s greatest acts as Queen occurred in 1624 when she declared all territory over which she had control to be Free Country. All slaves and reaching it from any region were forever free. This was to have a monumental impact, as thousands of slaves deserted Portuguese held areas to head for Nzingha’s land, strengthening her armies in the process.

Nzingha was perhaps the first Black Nationalist. By opening her territory to anyone escaping slavery, she transcended all the various ethnic and cultural differences of the people in the Angolan region. She saw that the common enemy was the Portuguese, who had been the masterminds of the slave trade and its devastating effect on her people for over one hundred years. Nzingha was well aware that the Portuguese used Black soldiers to fight their wars for them, and so she undertook a carefully organized attempt to infiltrate and destroy this use of Black soldiers by Europeans. She had several groups of her men wander back into Portuguese territory, and enlist in military service. Once her agents were established, they were able to convert whole companies of men to rebel against the Portuguese and join the cause of the Queen, taking with them the much needed guns and ammunition.

The Portuguese were outraged at this seemingly unbeatable Black Queen who constantly thwarted their efforts to conquer all of Angola. Their tactics of divide and conquer were ineffective against her because there was so much patriotism and fanatical devotion towards her. They even tried to discredit Nzingha by formally declaring that she was the illegitimate ruler of Angola, and by “appointing” their own ruler King Phillip.

In 1626, Nzingha’s stronghold in the city of Cuanza was captured, and she was forced to retreat from her country. Her time away seemingly only made her stronger, for in 1627 she returned to her country at the head of a strong army and recaptured Cuanza, sending the puppet King Philip fleeing for his life.

During her exile, Nzingha had become the Queen of the country of Matamba as well, and so she returned as the empress of two nations, more determined than ever to liberate her people. Despite several losses, including the capture and beheading of her sister by the hands of the Portuguese, Nzingha’s spirit was never broken.

She valiantly fought and held off the Portuguese control of Angola for over thirty years.

Finally in 1659, Nzingha, now more than seventy-five years old and perhaps weary from the long years of struggle, signed a peace treaty with the Portuguese. The remaining years of her life were spent trying to reconstruct her nations, seriously depleted by all the years of conflict.

She devoted her efforts to re-settling former slaves, and developing an economy of free men and women that could succeed without the slave trade.

Nzingha passed away in 1663 at the age of eighty. Sadly, the massive expansion of the Portuguese slave trade and eventual conquest of Angola followed her death, as none of her successors possessed her indomitable spirit. Though she did not succeed in expelling the Portuguese from her country, her historical legacy is of great importance as she awakened the spirit of nationalism and Black unity among her people in resistance to European domination.

Her legend would serve as an inspiration to the later resistance and anti-colonial movements that would occur throughout the West-Central African regions. To this day, her memory lives on among the oral traditions of the Angolan people who have not forgotten their Great Warrior Queen, Nzingha of Angola.

first published on knowyourblackhistory.com