MAZISI KUNENE

Where does one begin in evaluating the prodigious dimensions of a colossus like Mazisi Kunene? Does one begin with the two great Zulu poets of the eighteenth-century, Magolwane and Mshongweni, and end with the dazzling figure of Aime Cesaire in the late twentieth-century? Or does one begin with Nadine Gordimer, passing through Leopold Sedar Senghor, and ending with Ngugi wa Thiong'o? What this indicates is that the cultural space historically occupied by Mazisi Kunene is enormous and complex. Your two published epics, Anthem of the Decades and Emperor Shaka the Great, and the two anthologies, The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain and Zulu Poems, are an enormous edifice. Your as yet unpublished epics and anthologies are quite extensive. When all your works are eventually published in a democratic New South Africa, they will configure a new structure of our literary history.

-Ntongela Masilela, "The Return of Mazisi Kunene to South Africa: The End of an Intellectual Chapter in our Literary History", Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association, vol. XXI no. III, Fall 1993.