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Mazisi Kunene’s art may thus be redeeming in its reaf rmation of the centrality of African forms of expression as the instrument required to transcend and to rise above the subjugation of that universe and its peoples.By Ademola Araoye
The imposing genius of Mazisi Kunene is in forcing an acknowledgement of the solidity of our own greatness in spite of ourselves. The transcendental, transformatory and emancipatory character of the corpus of his works assures this. These works, most exemplified by the epics “Emperor Shaka the Great” and the “Anthem of the Decade”, the primary references in this appreciation, are best situated as a redeeming defiance of entrenched
epistemological foundations of a hostile social universe – this in an age and era when the validated fad was the instigated self-repudiation of the very quintessence of our black humanity.
Central to and included in these inspired self-repudiated essences were the cosmology and understandings of the self in all its expressive forms, and in this particular instance, the language and art forms of the subjugated. Repudiating the grundnorms of this hostile clime and era and sacrificing the immediate and immense dividends of capitulation to hegemonic forces and their preferred forms of expressions, Mazisi Kunene’s work languished in the obscurity that befell all other expressions outside the hegemonic genre that by their mere presence sought to validate their own authenticity on their own terms. This included narratives of African peoples rendered in their original languages.
These narratives, owing from the experiential groundings of their existence as a people, validated their cultural consciousness and forms as authentic representations of themselves. In these circumstances, surviving the onslaught of hegemonic forces in itself becomes a victory of sorts. For now, that is the major forte of the works of Mazisi Kunene in winning the argument over relevance through the sheer depth of these works and the logic of his posture vis-à-vis his contemporaries. In a paradoxical manner, the African renaissance begins the process of redeeming his legacy, even as his legacy validates the renaissance as the next logical step in moving away from the entrenched false truisms of an imposed consciousness and the associated trauma of the recent past.
Accordingly, the argument over the most authentic medium for the expression of the African experience has been an enduring duel. It engaged Mazisi Kunene and was central to the axiomatic foundation of his artistic expression. Mazisi Kunene was clear that the pivotal conceptual structures to convey the African experience had to be anchored in African cosmological systems. In essence, the borrowing of foreign conceptual equivalences to convey ideas grounded in understandings of the universe by a people can only distort the fundamental canons of their understandings of that universe. This would significantly detract from the wholesomeness of the experience being transmitted to those outside of that world.
Sustaining the integrity of the experience being transmitted was an imperative. This was more relevant to the African narrative in the aftermath of the violence done to the African understandings of his universe by the deep intrusion of hegemonic forces in the totality of the African space. In the post-apartheid era and the attendant opening of the space for the flowering of the authentic consciousness of the hitherto suppressed black self, the need to reaffirm the validity of the expressive forms that had been subjugated in the curse of the violent intrusion into that universe became inevitable. This was a categorical element in the liberalisation of the new space and the emancipation of the self.
The context must be well understood. When European history colonised and occupied African history it ruptured too many things: emotional, metaphysical, cultural and so on.1 For Mazisi Kunene, it was critical that the reaffirmation of the validity of African forms of expression be central to the artistic endeavours of African writers.
At the end of the rst decade of the twenty- rst millennium, this is still a bold assertion to make and a daunting objective to seek to attain. Yet, this argument has been enduring within his immediate environment in the South Africa of the 1930s and almost a generation later within African literary spheres. As Ntongela Masilela, the foremost interpreter of the African intellectual ferment of that era, notes:
Perhaps the most intractable fault line in South African literary history in the twentieth century was between those African writers who wrote in the African languages (in isiXhosa, isiZulu, in Sesotho, and so on) and those who wrote in the European languages (invariably in English). This historical divide emerged as a major intellectual debate in my country in the 1930s between.....
It seems to me that Mazisi Kunene’s unsurpassable poetic act was a desperate and dramatic attempt to resurrect African cosmology in the modern world. This was absolutely daring. But is such a monumental effort achievable given that Western modernity has torn Africa asunder in every conceivable way. While he appears to us as a great poet of African spiritual crisis, he may appear to posterity as the last great diviner of African cosmology.
For Mazisi Kunene, it was critical that the reaffirmation of the validity of African forms of expression be central to the artistic endeavours of African writers.
The teller of tales sits on the mountainside, Listening and humming his song in homage;
From many hills, the poems of excellence are sung The nights feed the dream and those of future times.
Mazisi Kunene intones that the poet must lead the way to illuminate and transcend the present.
We sing a great new song
From the power of life, each generation gives birth
Until by the thickness of their numbers their dust darkens the sun Some one is pregnant
The child shall rejoice in what is to come
A son of our nation follows the dark path to the forest.
He shall open the way for the children
Because of him the sun shall wait, Lingering in the east until he has arrived
To accompany him it opens its giant center,
Exposing the path into the end of the earth.
Notwithstanding these prophecies,
Kunene, tapping into and exploring the original voice of the community notes the tragic contemporaneous circumstances.
Such were the songs of the oracle But no one was listening
Except one young boy whose body he entered,
Generating in it a great power Binding his lips until the Forefathers had spoken.
In these challenging circumstances, the very survival of the works of Mazisi Kunene stands them out in their tenacious validation of the authenticity of African contribution in its most original voices and medium to world philosophy and literature. This is not a mean achievement as the narrative rendered in the original voices of a people becomes the instrument for the articulation of the very essences that the hegemonic forces seek to annihilate. The voice of a narrative is a critical element in validating its content. It locates the content in a proper context. The socio-cultural context is essentially the canvass on which a narrative presents itself. The voice of the context is thus a significant factor in validating a narrative. This may be understood as a reformulation of the Mazisi Kunene’s thesis that a people’s literature, as captured in his epics, should reaffirm the centrality of its cosmos and its understandings of its own locus in that cosmology. These narratives in their own original voices to the other worlds should project these understandings as legitimate contributions to the canons of world knowledge and codified human experience. And these should be validated by the mere fact of their own being and not by some externally imposed prejudices.
The struggle against captives of the other worlds in African societies of his time and the universal validation of the false truisms embedded in the acclaim acquired by African stories in hegemonic voices was essentially the burden of Mazisi Kunene. It was thus of determinant import that his narrative be served in the most original and authentic form; in Zulu, in what constitutes the very grounding of the historical epics of his narratives, as depicted in Emperor Shaka the great and the Anthem of the Decades and his many unpublished works.
The power of the Mazisi Kunene’s epics were not in any way diminished by the prejudices of the seemingly unending eternal moments of pain and deprivation that still subsist, thriving even in the rst decade of the new millennium, to challenge his robust thesis that the African narrative must not only be convened and conveyed in its most authentic voices to the world, but also must be placed at par on the highest pedestal accorded other global voices. These stout affirmations pre-date the more recent discourse on the true attributes of African literary
voice expressed in the post-colonial discourse regarding the appropriate medium for the transmission of the African narrative. His epics, Emperor Shaka the Great and the Anthem of the Decades are two works that mine the rich cultural heritage of the Zulu and exploit vast swathes of epistemological currents of its society to ascend the very zenith of literary accomplishment. It is no coincidence that the contemporaneous recognition of the transcendental nature of these works which directly force us to confront the complexities and sophistication of the repertoires of our own particularistic universe as a part of the heritage of humanity, should coincide with the post-apartheid era. For apartheid was in its self the brutal expression of an instigated repudiation of the very essence of this strand of humanity and every virtue associated with its understandings of the cosmos, worldviews and the experiential foundations of its manner of living-culture and in all its expressive ramifications.
Its Africanist (Bantucentric) worldview contrasts sharply with established negative understandings and facile interpretations of the African cosmology
The fate of the works of Masizi Kunene epitomised the tragic obscurity of the virtues of the black soul and spirit that the African renaissance attempts to rejuvenate. The fate of his works is one dimension, albeit a critical one, of the very fate of a whole people, and by extension a whole race. Yet, this fate was doomed to its tragic redemption in his prophetic vision. For in the triumphant proclamations of Nqoboka:
I am possessed of the voices of the Zulus.
The great congregations of peoples are singing and talking;
Their voices penetrate through to the Ancestral Spirits.
I feel their presence; I feel the presence of the ancient heroes. Even those who wish us ill dare not speak! 6
This salvo resonates with the entrenched defiance of the process of the African Renaissance, understood as a black-centered counterpoise to the dominant structure of ideas and the norms and institutions that govern relations in the system, as a radical philosophy. Its Africanist (Bantucentric) worldview contrasts sharply with established negative understandings and facile interpretations of the African cosmology that merely reflected an extension of power relations between Africa, descendants of Africans on the one hand and the hegemonic races who instituted the hegemonic structures of knowledge that were imposed on all subjugated in its path. The renaissance therefore seeks to repudiate the principal euro-centric and residual, even if still potent, Arab-Islamic ideational structures that constitute the foundations of the dominant order that have always de ned the peripheral locus and irrelevance of the black world in the universe.
The African Renaissance is also a process of and a constructivist paradigm for action. Its philosophical roots can be traced to the heterogeneous traditions of the structure of African belief systems and values and its multiple expressions. As a codified system of ideas and values, it synthesises the positive elements of these traditions with pan-Africanist ideals that have remained elusive into a coherent system of ideas that would guide common approaches to the multifarious challenges before Africans. In the formulation of epistemological institutions dedicated to the reversal of extra-African structures of knowledge, the renaissance seeks first and foremost to deconstruct the divisive definitions of the identities of African peoples and thereby reconstruct the common interests of all Bantu peoples. The African Renaissance revolves around three pivotal elements of transcendentalism, transformation and emancipation. These, together, distill the historical and experiential impulses of African societies at the end of the twentieth century. They express a changing cognitive complexity in the interpretation of historical forces that have moulded developments in Black Africa and responses adopted as a result. This is a multi-dimensional enterprise. Mazisi Kunene’s works represent one critical element of this multi-dimensional challenge.
Nothing in the literary firmament of Africa since the written word has done more to sustain the validity of the African medium as an authentic vehicle of the African narrative and promote the emancipatory, transcendentalism and transformatory virtues of African culture, including its numerous voices and stories, than the works of Mazisi Kunene. For both conservative and radical strains of the African renaissance, the end goal is the reaffirmation of the authenticity of the ideational structures and fundamental values that constituted the African space before its deflation. The goal is the transformation, at the spiritual, emotional, psychical and material levels, of the existential realities of the people. That captures the distilled quintessence of Mazisi Kunene in a way no other literary figure in the African firmament can lay claim to. Mazisi Kunene then emerges as the erce ancient literary bastion of the inevitability of a coming restoration of the disdained world of the African and its humiliated human universe. Mazisi Kunene slides open the window to this denied ancient vista. Through his works, he provides an indelible stamp of legitimation to the cultural wellsprings and fountains that finally break as well as extend the boundaries of the horizon of the world. Kunene’s burdens thus paradoxically constituted a restoration of the world through the infusion of vital voices long muffled by the articulators of hegemonic cacophony. Kunene’s authentic voice must then restore our faith as we cross the flooded river in a purification of our world in the restoration of ourselves:
We are a proud nation; we beg from no one
He spoke this way to restore his own faith,
To beg to give him the fruits of her envied power
He knew she alone was the voice to whom all paid tribute
Her visions were like the long tails of lightning.
From her mind’s branches the traveler crossed the ooded rivers.7 Mazisi Kunene represented one
sharp end of an ideological and historical polarity. The dialectical struggle at the level of ideas is given concrete expressions to in the conflicts that are implicit in the unending struggle to define what constitutes the authentic voice of a people, a race. The voice couches the narratives of a people with its natural accent. A narrative is imbued with legitimacy when all can relate and pay tribute to it as a communal voice, expressive of the nuanced sophistry as only the people as a community can claim its authorship.
Through his works, he provides an indelible stamp of legitimation to the cultural wellsprings and fountains that finally break as well as extend the boundaries of the horizon
of the world.
The poet becomes a possessed vessel of the assertion of communal narrative and the legitimation of this voice as the epistemological foundations of the society. This process of legitimation has been integral to the historical struggle for emancipation.
Indeed, Kunene was essentially a struggle and his works an arsenal in a titanic clash that pits a seemingly overpowering force in all its pretences against an entrenched cultural universe that would not succumb to the literal repower of the alien narrow understandings of the world. The dimensions of the struggle that Mazisi Kunene championed remain now as the turbulent undercurrent in the open navigation of progressive forces to translate the gains of the end of the twentieth century beyond the mere material acquisition that is often equated with modernity.
The end of the twentieth century itself coincided with the dissipation of historical conjunctures that had been central to the social construction of the world of black Africa. These historical conjunctures were constituted by the confluence of four major developments.
These developments include the end of the cold war that made bankrupt traditional calculus of super power strategic concerns. The fluidity of the end of the Cold War initially put on hold the need of hegemonic forces to manipulate the African space and contradictions as pawns in grand global strategies across ideological lines of the cold war. The second is the de-legitimation of the concept of spheres of influence maintained by neo-colonial forces and a third was the final defeat of apartheid in South Africa. Finally, the paradoxes of a globalisation process set in motion by the end of the Cold War has called into question the relevance of colonially inspired political institutions that have remained dysfunctional to the transformation, emancipation and developmental aspiration of all Bantu peoples. The twentieth century, as a historical era, was underpinned by dominant Euro-centric and entrenched, even if residual, Arab- Islamic structures of knowledge and values which de ned the numerous identities of black peoples, imposed contra-pulling interests and reinforced the hegemony of the extra-Africa structures of ideas within the African world.
Mazisi Kunene was the early precursor of a struggle. In its repudiation of the dominant extra- African structures of knowledge and values as the pivots of the organisation of society and the locus of the Bantu within the global spectrum, the African Renaissance challenges the structural foundations on which the superstructure of the international realm and the domineering voices of global narratives are built. This international realm is founded on colonially inspired alien structures of knowledge that transformed the historical geography of Africa in a few years. The penetration of these alien forces into Africa truncated the trajectory of developments in societies. It put in its stead incongruous ideas and institutions that confused identities of the peoples and instituted an arbitrary divisive redefinition of the allegiances of the continent. These, in turn, have spun pervasive illegitimacies and multidimensional crises in post-colonial institutions that have remained the challenge of black Africa in the second half of the ending century. These extra-African structures of knowledge, which have dominated the African space since, created new contentions among black Africans as a result of the alienating impact of the structures of ideas, values and institutions which were the bases of the social construction of the black world. Africa’s relations with the universe, the dominant values and worldviews, the rules and norms that governed intra- African relations and the place of black Africa in the universal scheme of affairs were thus externally derived.
From one stanza to another, Mazisi Kunene rises to transcendental heights in his prophetic sermons on the curse of the invading force that must seek to disembowel the universe of the Zulu, implied the universe of black humanity.
He said: My great sister, this beer pot from which I drink
Is one which was given to me by my father, Jama
He said to me, “Drink from this beer pot, my son,
And never be afraid of the stampede of feet.
Often people rush and whip up dust in all directions,
Invoking others to join them in their haste but to no avail
They are blinded by their own enthusiasms.
You, wiser than them, must pace behind, watching their footsteps Indeed, however fast you may race you will not earn their love However much you may give of your treasure and powers
None of this may satisfy their appetites
They shall enter through the small gate into your royal enclosure, Breaking taboos, letting themselves roam at will,
Until nally they shall demand the secret of your bowels!”
I can still hear the vibrations of my father’s voice
It is only the Ancestors who know how to guide us
It is to them only that I shall humble myself.8
The African Renaissance confronts this disemboweled construction of the African world as a philosophy and a paradigm of action. The implication of the Mandelan accentuation of the African-ness of the Bantu is to challenge the legitimacy of post-colonial and conservative identities and interests constructed by the alien imposed regime. Mazisi Kunene’s strife and, consequently, these transcendental products of the struggle are integral to the defiance of the larger destructive foment of this epoch. His works thus threatened the foundations of the alien instigated self-repudiation of the African and helped to legitimise, at the spiritual level, the deadly resistance in the struggles that were adumbrated in that hostile space, and temporal environment.
A narrative is imbued with legitimacy when all can relate and pay tribute to it as a communal voice, expressive of the nuanced sophistry as only the people as a community can claim its authorship.
Mazisi, accordingly, transports us to a very critical juncture as the clash between now dominant systems of ideas alien to Africa on the one hand and the confrontation between strands of the alien forces and African values and systems, including and especially religious beliefs systems, on the other hand, begin to destabilise African communities. In the rst confrontations Africans unhinged from their cultural moorings have been instrumentalised as vanguard and shock troops of alien systems seeking to consolidate their hegemonies in the black universe.
Consistent with Mazisi Kunene’s exploration of the Zulu understandings of the cosmos and the relations between the gods and man in that understanding, in the Anthem of the Decades, the debate between Sodume and the princess demonstrates the importance of the social responsibility of the gods in the realigning of the social construction of the world, including punishing the negligence of living. This is a critical nexus in directing social action. Yet, the basic assumption of the Zulu is that all entities in the universe and ultimately the cosmos are physical, even if everything cannot be judged on the basis of their physical attributes. In the rich metaphors of the Anthem of the Decades, Sodume confronts all with the futility of yielding to the allures of temptation as her messenger witnesses to the sight of a brooding Somazwi:
... I found Sodume at his home Tearing at dusk with streaks of lightning.
As I came closer I saw large processions
Walking triumphantly as though from distant worlds
Perhaps they were messengers who fertilize the earth.
I, too, faltered and got carried away by their triumphs
I heard them narrating tales of great earth-harvests
I checked my envy as I realized How such happiness is shot through with uncertainty.
This I discovered when I planted my words in the wind
As the emptiness of the instigated allures becomes manifest, it is inevitable that the African universe realigns itself by revalidating its own values and its existential structures through narratives rendered in its own voices.
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