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LEWIS NKOSI |
| It is difficult and complicated in the year 2000 to evaluate
whether Lewis Nkosi has become the major literary critic that was expected
of him in 1960, over forty years ago. A remarkable example of this high
expectation is revealed in Nadine Gordimer’s essay of 1966, “How Not to
Know the African”, assembled in her latest anthology of essays, Living in
Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1999). The essential thrust of the essay was the condemnation of the 1965
Suppression of Communism Amendment Act, followed by another one of 1966,
which banned the writings of the Sophiatown Renaissance writers, including
those of, among others, Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi himself,
Dennis Brutus, Can Themba, Alex La Guma, Alfred Hutchinson, Todd Matshikiza.
Wishing to indicate the high quality of the literature South Africans have
been prevented from reading, Gordimer writes of Lewis Nkosi: “These writers---with
the exception of Abrahams and Hutchinson, whose books are banned individually---are
under total ban now, and we cannot read what they have written, nor shall
we be able to read what they may write in the future. One whose name I have
not mentioned yet, Lewis Nkosi, is probably the greatest loss to us of them
all. This young man, who left his home in South Africa on an exit permit
[in 1961] in 1965, published a book of essays entitled Home and Exile. I
took the opportunity to buy and read the essays while on a visit to Zambia,
for Lewis Nkosi is on the list of exiles whose word and work are under that
blanket ban of April this year. The book contains critical writing of a
standard that has never before been achieved by a South African writer,
white or black. Here is the sibling Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, F. R.
Leavis we have never had. If the ban on his work did not prevent me quoting
from two of the essays---the first a brilliant exploration of the conflict
between truth as the individual has laboured to discover it for himself
and truth as the glib public proposition dictated by the contingencies of
political life; the second a cool, erudite look at fiction written by black
South Africans---it would not be necessary for anyone to take my word for
it.” (p.118-119). Whether Lewis Nkosi’s achievement can stand comparison
with these three great critics is another matter. What is fundamentally
relevant is that as a member of the Sophiatown Renaissance, the last intellectual
and literary generation of the New African Movement, Lewis Nkosi is the
culminating point of a South African critical tradition within modernity,
whose origins are Elijah Makiwane (“Livingstone’s Last Journals”, The Kaffir
Express, June 1, 1875) and William Wellington Gqoba (“Notes From the Transkei
Upon Witchcraft”, The Kaffir Express, January 6, February 7, March 7, 1874),
passing through Isaac Wauchope (The Natives And Their Missionaries [1903])
and R. V. Selope Thema (“The ‘White Hills’ of the Rand”, Umteteli wa Bantu,
November 24, December 8, 1924), and continuing on in H. I. E. Dhlomo (“Rain”,
Ilanga lase Natal, September 16, 23, 1944) and Jordan Kush Ngubane (“Shaka’s
Social, Political and Military Ideas” an appendix in Donasld Burness’s Shaka:
King of the Zulus in Africa Literature [1976]). It is this critical heritage
that explains the cultural richness of Lewis Nkosi’s critical imagination.
But the absolutely determinant figure is unquestionably H. I. E. Dhlomo.
Dhlomo’s great essays and prose poems which appeared in Ilanga lase Natal
in the 1940s and the early 1950s were instrumental in Nkosi intellectual
formation. Dhlomo’s essays are too numerous to even give a sampling of them.
As an indication of this determinant influence, Nkosi’s threnodic homage
to his master speaks for itself: To Herbert Dhlomo H. I. E., H. I. E., Me and all my brothers dark, Those that mumble in the dust, Without a hope, without a joy, Streaked with tears for ra- vaged Africa Have, with thy silence, ceased to live.
In vain we seek the lost
H. I. E., H. I. E., (Ilanga lase Natal, October 22, 1955) When Lewis Nkosi penned this threnody, H. I. E. Dhlomo was tragically ill, had only one more year to live. He asks for empowerment from the master because this great New African’s vision was for the liberation and the restoration of Africa. This makes it clear that Dhlomo was far more fundamental in the historical formation of Nkosi’s critical imagination, than Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis could ever be. In fact, the sense of continuity between H. I. E. Dhlomo and Lewis Nkosi is apparent in another sense, in that the columns of Dhlomo (“Our Weekly Feature” which appeared under the pseudonym of “X”, and “Weekly Review and Commentary” which appeared under the pseudonym of “Busy Bee”) ceased publication in Ilanga lase Natal in 1953, where they had appeared continuously since 1943, they were ‘replaced’ by Lewis Nkosi’s column, “Life As I See It”, as of May 1955. Nkosi’s column in style and form resembled those of Dhlomo. In one of these early columns, preoccupied with other matters, Nkosi managed to pay homage to his master in context of other New African intellectuals: “But some people categorically deny Magwaza’s assertion [the prophetess’s claim that she had seen Shaka in a dream]. They contend that a nation cannot be set free by a spirit of the dead, no matter how great they might have been in their lifetime, but by fiery alive men of Matthews andLuthuli’s stature. They say that an R. R. R. [Dhlomo] and a Herbert Dhlomo can only investigate write about, and interpret the soul of Shakafor a Luthuli to draw freely there from an inspiration to lead the people with courage. They even argue that Shaka’s last words were a prophecy of great insight into the future, but certainly not a curse on the nation. To say the opposite, they contend, is trying to make excuses for the death of talent, lack of spirit and the courage to go forward. In short they regard Thokozile Magwaza as a freakish child of hallucination” (Life As I See It, Ilanga lase Natal, May 14, 1955). Two immediate observations should be registered concerning this excerpt.In its allusion to the dialectic between modernity and tradition, it was broaching a historical theme that preoccupied a large portion of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s major writings for over thirty years. In its oblique engagement with the question of the role of African prophetesses in resistance to modernity, it was invoking the historical example of Nongqawuse, the prophetess who brought the Xhosa Nation to the great tragedy of 1857, a figure who featured very prominently in Dhlomo’s imagination in the form of a stage play, Nongqawuse. So, there are many historical pointers, both symbolic and actual, that lead from H. I. E. Dhlomo to Lewis Nkosi. The writings of Lewis Nkosi in Ilanga lase Natal were merely indicators of the lineage of intellectual and cultural heritage. A few years later Nkosi moved to Johannesburg where he worked as a journalist on Drum magazine and on its sister newspaper, Golden City Post. It was while working for these publications that Lewis Nkosi became an intellectual member of the Sophiatown Renaissance, or the so-called Drum writers. Although Nkosi’s writings in Drum and Golden City Post are interesting and stimulating in themselves, they do not compare in originality and brilliance to his other writings in other publications written at this time. The true measure of Nkosi’s intellectual development is to be found in the articles, essays and reviews which appeared in the Liberal Party newspaper, Contact. For example these writings in Contact (“A Sophiatown in Poland”, April 4, 1958; “Sophiatown has become a state of mind”, December 13, 1958; “Of Our Culture”, November 28, 1959) were a clear indication that he was determined to inherent the intellectual mantle of H. I. E. Dhlomo, thereby becoming a brilliant literary critic who was so deeply to fascinate Nadine Gordimer a decade later in the 1960s. The figure of Dhlomo was lodged indelibly in the intellectual imagination of Nkosi. In other intellectual horizons and directions, this is also true. Of all the Sophiatown Renaissance intellectuals, Lewis Nkosi was the most consistently engaged with the role of the city in facilitating the construction of modernity. Nkosi’s essays on foreign cities (“Encounter with New York”, The New African, April, May 1962; “Doing Paris with Breyten”, The New African, December 1965) are a direct descendant of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s essays on South African cities (“Bloemfontein”, Inkundla ya Bantu, First Fortnight, October 1946; “On Durban”, Ilanga lase Natal, February 22, 1947; In Praise of Durban”, Ilanga lase Natal, December 18, 1954). I forego indicating other impressive writings of Lewis Nkosi which appeared at this time in Ruth First’s Fighting Talk. To map further this intellectual lineage, again of all the Sophiatown Renaissance writers, Nkosi was the most deeply fascinated by the idea or the historical construct of the New African which he theorizes with tremendous force in his remarkable book Tasks and Masks (1980). Not only that, in the early 1960s Lewis Nkosi was a literary editor of a magazine called The New African based in London. It is not surprising to know that Nkosi’s preoccupation with this notion in the 1970s can be traced in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s essays of the 1940s formulating the idea of the New African and its appropriation from the concept of the New Negro of W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke and others (“Racial Attitudes: An African View-Point”, The Democrat, November 17, 1945; “African Attitudes to the European”, The Democrat, December 1, 1945;“Bantu Culture and Expression”, Ilanga lase Natal, July 24, 1948; “Personal and Cultural Achiement”, Ilanga lase Natal, August 14, 1948). These intellectual connexions between H. I. E. Dhlomo and Lewis Nkosi are not intended to imply the absolute originality of Dhlomo within the New African Movement. For in both of these intellectual preoccupations, the definition of the New African and the role of the modern city in the twentieth-century, H. I. E. Dhlomo is preceded by R. V. Selope Thema within the New African Movement. R. V. Selope Thema himself is preceded by Solomon T. Plaatje. Preceding any of the members of the New African Movement, two or three generations earlier, is Elijah Makiwane within the Xhosa Cultural Renascence. In conclusion, to make sense of the historical moment of Lewis Nkosi, one of the last surviving members of the Sophiatown Renaissance, itself the last cultural movement of the New African Movement, it is absolute necessary to situate him within the complex cultural nexus of the New African intellectual tradition(s). |
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