DAVID LIVINGSTONE PHAKAMILE YALI-MANISI

DLP Yali-Manisi, poet and patriot, died near Queenstown last month in a rapidly dilapidating hut along a rutted road in a valley exposed to corrosive winds. The author of five published volumes of poetry and at least five other manuscripts unpublished or lost, he was in his time the greatest exponent of the art of the Xhosa imbongi (oral poet). Although he never met or heard a poetic performance by the greatest of all the imbongi, SEK Mqhayi (1875-1945), who was so revered for his power and breadth of vision that he was dubbed Imbongi yesizwe jikelele, "the poet of the entire nation", Manisi himself was marked as the true successor to Mqhayi and named Imbongi entsha, "the new poet". Yet he died, on September 18, in crushing obscurity, largely unwept, unhonoured and unsung by the nation he served. David Livingstone Phakamile Yali-Manisi was born in the Khundulu valley in Emigrant Thembuland on September 17, 1926, the eldest son of Johnson Mpungutyana Yali-Manisi and Noleft Nokuhomba; he was a member of the Ncotsho clan, renowned as Thembu warriors. . . . The power, eloquence and uncompromising nationalism of his poetry makes him one of the greatest poets in the Xhosa language, and one of the finest the country has ever produced. He failed to attract the recognition he so richly merited in his lifetime because he was a victim of the impermanence of the spoken word and of circumstance. His public career coincided with the apartheid years, when praising chiefs was no longer a practice universally admired; his poetic medium was the Xhosa language, generally reserved for books studied in schools; few copies of his books were printed, fewer were sold, and all are now out of print.

-Jeff Opland, "Unsung imbongi bows out", Electronic Daily Mail & Guardian, October 26, 1999.