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LYDIA UMKASETEMBA |
| Perhaps the most direct evidence that the structure of South African intellectual and cultural history is still not as visible to us as it should be is indicated by the fact that neither of the two major literary histories written from the perspective of New African cultural politics, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi’s The Oral And Written Literature in Nguni (1946) and Raymond [Mazisi] Kunene’s An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry: Both Traditional and Modern (1958), respectively submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Witwatersrand and as a thesis at the University of Natal, do not as much as mention the name of this great historical figure of, Lydia umka Setemba. She was arguably the first great Zulu prose articulator, articulator because she performed her oral narratives, rather than reduce them to being written down. She dominated Zulu literature in the second half of the nineteenth-century in the same way that Magolwane, Shaka’s Court poet, dominated the first half. Lydia Umkasetemba may possibly be the one who brought Zulu literature into the modern age. Mazisi Kunene may possibly argue that since he was concerned strictly with poetic matters and poetic form(s), Lydia Umkasetemba could hardly be expected to have been within his historical purview. The most direct riposte to Kunene would be that since Umkasetemba sang great prose, which was practically in every dimension poetical, she should have been a point of reference in his archeological investigations. Besides, at another level of counter-argument, since the prose of her oral narratives was the illuminating light of this historical period, the oral poets (Imbongi) of her generation and of subsequent generations were made visible by her greatness, even if the source of the light to later generations was unlocatable. It is much more difficult to explain why Lydia Umkasetemba was unknown to Bennedict Vilakazi. Since her oral prose narratives were published in 1868 in Henry Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions, And Histories of the Zulus (Davis and Sons, Pietermaritzburg), and given that Benedict Vilakazi was thorough and comprehensive in his scholarly protocols, this omission is a great inexplicable enigma. Lydia Umkasetemba was also unknown to H. I. E. Dhlomo, the great essayist, poet and playwright. In his voluminous writings on cultural matters and cultural history on the pages of Umteteli wa Bantu newspaper in the 1920s to the pages of Ilanga lase Natal newspaper in the 1950s, Umkasetemba is conspicuous by her absence. This all the more strange because H. I. E. Dhlomo searched very deeply in our cultural past for women historical figures who made possible the transition from tradition into modernity. Although A. C. Jordan’s Towards an African Literature (1973), consisting of essays which originally appeared in Africa South between 1957 and 1960, was ostensibly about the literary lineages of Xhosa literature, here also the omission of Lydia Umkasetemba, even if only as a reference, is also very strartling. Even D. D. T. Jabavu’s magnificent Bantu Literature: Classifications and Reviews (1921), a booklet that contains this profound statement, itself ironically omits mentioning Lydia Umkasetemba: “That ‘The Bantu Languages have no literature’ is a statement which has been repeated so often that many Bantu [African] people have themselves been led to believe it. It has been expressed both by those who are not able to read through a single book in a Bantu tongue, and also by those who having lived for many years among the Bantu have, for some reason or other, never taken the trouble to search into the faqcts. . . The fact, however, that we see very little of Bantu literature in public places does not necessarily denote that it is little or non-existent. If we search for it, we shall discover quite a quantity.” Lydia Umkasetemba is simply one of the fundamental landmarks of African cultural history in South Africa over the last two hundred years: the period of the dialectical struggle between tradition and modernity. The call for the African Renaissance in South Africa today is historically apropos because of the necessity of giving rebirth and renewal to the achievements of the New African Movement, which was itself imperfect given its unawreness of a great literary and cultural figure such as Lydia Umkasetemba. By remapping the intellectual contours of South African cultural history, the African Renaissance would be completing one of the modernist tasks of the New African Movement. | |