Hlonipha Mokoena speaks to Stephen Coan about the story behind her pioneering biography, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. Mokoena, who is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Colombia University, says that most people know very little about Fuze, despite the fact that he was the first writer in Zulu.
Magema Fuze is best known as the inhabitant of footnotes: his 1922 book Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (The Black People and Whence They Came) is more referenced than read. But now a new book, Magema Fuze — The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual by Hlonipha Mokoena, has freed Fuze from footnote obscurity, placing him on the front cover of a biography that positions him as a key figure in the intellectual life of this country.
Born around 1840, Fuze was enrolled as a young teenager at Ekukhanyeni School in Bishopstowe, founded by Bishop John W. Colenso. Baptised as a Christian in 1859, Fuze went on to become Colenso’s printer and assistant. In later life he was a prolific contributor — of letters and articles — to newspapers. In his eighties, he published Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona, later translated into English and published in 1979 as The Black People and Whence They Came.
Storyteller Gcina Mhlope spills her spending secrets with Mamello Masote, admitting that she is “not very good with money”, and is an impulsive buyer. So what has been her biggest extravagance to date? – Her house by the sea.
What did your childhood experience teach you about money?
We hardly had any money, so I learnt to rely on myself.
The recent deaths of 39 young Xhosa initiates has unleased a storm regarding cultural practices and human rights. Many are against the practice (read Mondli Makhanya’s piece here), many are blindly for it and, somewhere in the middle are those who simply ask that it be done safely. Lucas Ntyintyane pleads for education and understanding regarding Xhosa initiation rites while blasting the rogues who do practice unsafe circumcision.
The cultural storm unleashed by the death of 39 Xhosa initiates is a perfect illustration of the dangers of shallow knowledge and cultural intolerance. We are bombarded with distortions: every social ill – from rape to corruption – is now the fault of ulwaluko (initiation).
What a load of hogwash! Just because you hate the practice of ulwaluko, that is no reason to insult those who hold it dear.
This crisis is an opportunity to educate each other about ulwaluko and promote cultural tolerance. Loss of lives is unfortunate and cannot be tolerated, but ulwaluko is not the devil here. The main culprits are the greedy and illegal traditional nurses.
Many writers enjoy a kind of afterlife through the legacy of their work. The passing of Dennis Brutus may have left a hole in the hearts of friends and family but he is remembered through his poetry and his lasting contributions to society.
Brutus is a main focus of the latest issue of African Writing, with contributions by four friends and fellow writers: Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, Obiwu, Rose Francis and Don Mattera.
From Losing my Great Friend by Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The text message was short, sharp and to the point: “Your friend Dennis Brutus died early today”.
It was December 26, 2009, and I was in my village getting into the groove of the Christmas season. The message came from my friend and brother, Jossey Ogbuanoh, who had been my colleague in the defunct THISWEEK magazine back in 1987 when Dennis Brutus used to visit with me in the office when he was in Nigeria. Over the years most of my Nigerian friends have wondered at the letters I used to get from Brutus, the legendary South African poet, author of A Simple Lust, Letters to Martha, Sirens Knuckles and Boots. Brutus and I have travelled the Lagos streets (with him lamenting that there were still open drains on Nigerian streets). But Brutus was not all complaints and seriousness, for he once suggested that we should co-author a book of erotica!
In 1989 I was appointed a Distinguished Visitor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of Western Ontario, Canada. I travelled to Canada and put a call through to Brutus who was then the head of the Black Studies Department of the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He immediately invited me over to deliver a lecture to his literature students.
Dennis Brutus represents his poetic protagonist as a latter-day troubadour, like the Hellenic Orpheus or the Judeo-Egyptian Moses, who is given a glimpse of an impossible beauty that he could not behold. In the myth of Orpheus, for instance, the poet-lover transmutes from songs of revelry to elegies of solitude. Orpheus’s quest after his wife Eurydice, who is bitten to death by a nest of snakes, takes him through a tortuous odyssey from the land of the living to the chasm of Hades and back to an inevitable destruction. Brutus’s poetic personage comes with the complete ensemble of a verdant allure, an invasive serpent, and a foreshadowing violence. His poetry is a song of love, betrayal, torment, and death.
Theodore Sheckels notes that a great deal of contemporary South African literature deals with sufferings in the mines and the prisons, particularly the latter. Significantly, whereas twentieth century speculative philosophers emphasize the prison condition of life in the abstract, many apartheid-era South African writers and scholars actually lived it. Brutus is a prominent example of such a writer-scholar whose experience of a prison term at the infamous Robben Island with Nelson Mandela likewise imprisons his poetic persona in a perpetual loneliness. The troubadour of his poetry is the most melancholic of all South African literary protagonists. His hero is forever a lover, scouring through the depths of his beloved’s contours in an insatiable quest that leaves him empty. He is always the soldier engrossed in the conquest of diverse territories that only leaves a bequest of blood and bodies, turning his glories into ashes. He is a marooned poet dutifully carving his beloved’s sonorous eulogies on the hardened barks of history, only to behold a ricochet of sullen notes of unrequited love.
Every South African will no doubt remember the Saturday of May 15 2004. They should: for it was arguably the most glorious day yet in the history of this country’s soccer.
It was decades earlier though in 1909 that South Africa became the first country outside of Europe to become a FIFA member – before Argentina and Chile in 1912, and the United States in 1913. Forty-seven years later in 1956, the idea of an all-Africa tournament – an African Cup of Nations – was first proposed by Egypt. Why the African delegates invited a representative from South Africa, a country whose policies they disapproved of, to discuss what was a turning point not only in the history of the continent’s sport, but of Africa – is a mystery. But then in 1956 not many African nations were FIFA members and it was only Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco that had gained political independence.
Azanian exiles
weeping against the moon,
traversing the shores of strange lands
standing attention to foreign flags
alienated, tolerated nomads
sleeping in cars, park benches
or dining with kings,
I pine for you
with longing that eats my spirit,
tears out my eyes
Hearts reaching out
across the dark distances
where emotions are imprisoned
in the breast
voices crying where others are silent
Author of A Man Who Is Not a Man, Thando Mgqolozana sits down with Margaret von Klemperer to tackle the issues surrounding male circumcision, the reaction to his book and more:
MvK: What made you write this book? Did you feel a need to break through the wall of silence that surrounds topics such as circumcision?
TM: What I am trying to do is not be for or against the whole thing. I give credit to my readers to make up their minds. But every circumcision season, people die in hundreds, and no one says anything. If a white person says something, they are racist; if a woman, then it’s man’s business; if a Zulu, it’s a Xhosa matter. The only people who can deal with it are circumcised men, and if you start to talk about it, your manhood is questioned. It’s not a book about botched circumcision. It’s bigger than that: it’s something we need to talk about. The question that I am really asking is whether circumcision has lost its old significance. It was the traditional transformation from boyhood to adulthood, and it was useful because it was the only way black people could do this — they weren’t going to school or anything like that. But with time came other ways of socialising people.
Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University and co-editor of Re-imagining the Social in South Africa, Peter Vale cuts a troubled figure as he marks the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Where are we going as a nation? What have we lost and how can we get it back? he asks, in an article that ranges from Invictus to Jawaharal Nehru:
DESPITE the silken promises of the World Cup, South Africa has marked the 20th anniversary of FW de Klerk’s famous speech with distinct bleakness – a torpor close to despair.
To appreciate this requires a viewing of the film Invictus, Hollywood’s account of SA’s victory in another World Cup, rugby’s, 1995 competition. More than anything else, the movie highlights the sense of awe that South Africans felt as they searched for a new identity and their realisation that in order to achieve it, they would have to sacrifice.
Of course, this country is not the first to experience the rush and the excitement of a new national beginning. On the eve of Independence – August 14, 1947 – Jawaharal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, delivered a speech which began with two dramatic sentences: “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique and Post-Apartheid Knowledge edited by Heather Jacklin, Peter Vale Book homepage
EAN: 9781869141790 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Two reports appeared in the Mail & Guardian this week on the Xhosa initiation ritual of circumcision for boys – cultural rites and trials of endurance that are currently taking place in many spots in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces which, because of infectious conditions, cause the deaths of a number of initiates each year, and leave even more mutilated for life.
The death toll for 2009 is approaching fifty:
Four more boys have died because of botched circumcisions in the Eastern Cape, bringing the death toll to 49, health officials said on Friday.
“Three of the boys died in Mdantsane in East London and the other in Mount Ayliff last week,” Health Department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo said.
“These cases were only reported to us today [Friday],” he said.
Thando Mgqolozana‘s first novel, A Man Who is Not a Man, tackles Xhosa circumcision head on, as journalist Percy Zvomuya learned when he attended the book’s launch in Grahamstown. Zvomuya’s subsequent feature on the book is part reportage from the launch, part review, and part sociological treatise. He compares A Man Who is Not a Man with Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. The piece is well worth a read: (more…)
There are, we think, some profound notions in what he says, like “breaking the silence” around circumcision – as this ritual has been a total secret for generations, especially from the mothers of the initiates.
In fact, the author received a text message from a young lady who had attended the launch at Wordfest, who said that her brother had undergone the circumcision ceremony as a youngster, and had committed suicide shortly thereafter. After hearing what Mgqolozana had to say, she bought the book for her mother so that she could read and understand what actually happens, and hoped that this would bring closure to a very sad event.
An important speech for our times:
* * * * * * * *
Imagine that you live in a world where innocent young boys are dying, eaten by a cultural practise gone wrong. They die, sometimes get amputated and loose their manhood, but certainly all the time they take with them a baggage of physical and psychological trauma, for life.
You are their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.
Talk about lifting the veil. When I catch up with Thando Mgqolozana at the Cape Town Book Fair, I discover that he is of course aware that his debut novel, A Man Who Is Not A Man (KwaZulu-Natal Press), will court controversy.
A botched traditional circumcision results in the narrator emerging from this harrowing experience with an “abnormal penis” after narrowly escaping death.
The topic chose him, Mgqolozana says. “I was circumcised when I was 18. I am now 25. I had a similar experience, although without necessarily the same result. I have chosen to write about this and to take the consequences. I feel I have earned the right to do so – the problem is that the minute you write about this, you subject your own manhood to scrutiny.”
The narrator nonetheless does not hold back in the telling of a gritty tale of pain and triumph. It opens doors on suffering and horror not discussed with such openness before. He takes us up the mountain where the circumcision takes place – although he stresses often that “the matters of the mountain should remain on the mountain”.
But Mgqolozana has been so reviled, through no fault of his own, because of the processes that went awry that it seems he has little to lose.
“I want to open the debate around the failings of those who conduct the circumcision. I want to be a voice for the voiceless,” he says.
Such activism has not hampered Mgqolozana’s essential novelistic gifts. He cut his fictional teeth on a few short stories, he says, and he has allowed his imagination free rein.
He has chosen EL Doctorow’s epigram to preface his story: “There’s no longer any such thing as fiction and non-fiction, there’s only narrative.”
Mgqolozana is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar completing a Masters in medical research at the University of Western Cape. He is spirited, ardent, challenging.
“Have you ever wondered what happens to those bakhwetha whose circumcision fails at the bush?” asks the narrator in the prologue. “What happens to them at the mountain? And who do they become afterwards? That’s an important one – ‘who do they become’?”
Dramatically escalating prices of raw materials, driven by rapid industrialisation in China and other countries of the global South as well as by looming world shortages, had for the few years preceding the financial meltdown and global recession of 2009 promoted a new scramble for Africa’s natural resources. It signalled a brisk turnaround in prospects for what The Economist had dubbed the “hopeless continent” as recently as 1999. However, while average growth rates across the continent have increased, the implications for Africa’s development were and remain at best dubious. (more…)
Hlonipha Mokoena speaks to Stephen Coan about the story behind her pioneering biography, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. Mokoena, who is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Colombia University, says that most people know very little about Fuze, despite the fact that he was the first writer in Zulu.
