| Back |
WILLIAM WELLINGTON GQOBA |
| It is perhaps a measure of William Wellington Gqoba's complex position at the intersection of modernity and tradition that the two most important texts on South African literary history, A. C. Jordan's Towards an African Literature: The Emergence od Literary Form in Xhosa (1973; originally appeared as a series in the 1950s in the Africa South quarterly) and Benedict W. Vilakazi's dissertation of 1946 The Oral and Written Literature in Nguni, present such glaringly contradictory viewpoints and perspective on this arguably first modern Xhosa poet, literary essayist, newspaper editor and historian. Vilakazi wrote: "It is very difficult to gauge Rubusana's ability as a writer, from his Zemk'inkomo Magwalandini [1906; Preserve Your Heritage!]. The book is a compilation of works by a number of authors. It can be divided into sections of which one deals with purely Religious Poetry. The contributions of W. W. G. [William Wellington Gqoba], covering pages 24-130, suggest an attempt in poetry at what Bunyan achieved in prose in his Pilgrim's Progress. W. W. G's poetry lacks originality. He simply wrote as he felt, saw and experienced. His writings are those of a man who knows what he wants to say, but fails to say it adequately for lack of style and apt words" (p. 291). A decade later, as though it were a riposte, Jordan wrote the following: "In a previous essay, we paid special attention to William W. Gqoba, the dominant literary figure of the earlier part of the 19th century. His poetry, as we have shown, reflects the social changes of his time. But in order to get as full a picture as possible of this epoch, some attention must be given to his lesser contemporaries, most of whom were far less ready than he was to accept the idea that the white people 'gave up their homeland for love of us blacks'. In fact, the Great Discussions---on Education and Christianity---would seem to have been an attempt on Gqoba's part to meet the sceptics of his time" (p. 85). Several factors render Vilakazi's evaluation and judgment unfounded and untenable. This issue has to be confronted because several Western scholars have been dismissive of Gqoba on the basis of Vilakazi's critique (i. e., Albert S. Gerard's Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic [1971]; a problematic book that does not properly acknowledge its extensive borrowings from Rubusana, Jordan, Mazisi Kunene, among many others). First, Vilakazi passes his judgment of Wellington Gqoba as an afterthought, to what seemed to have been his central concern, the difficulty of passing judgment on Rubusana's intellect and writerly abilities, since the anthology is a compilation of texts written by others [Interestingly, despite this criticism, a few pages earlier, Vilakazi had characterized the period between 1900 to 1930 as "The Age of Rubusana and Fuze (1900-1930)"]. Indeed, other than a very short Introduction in Xhosa to the London second edition of 1911, in which Rubusana mentions the necessity of such a book since it conveys a national spirit, the imperativeness of translating the anthology for greater and wider dissemination, and the inclusion of Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba in this edition, he does not provide any contextualization nor a characterization of the singularity of each of the contributors. The glossary at the end of the book though helpful would seem insufficient. This is a pity because Jordan's analyses in Towards an African Literature shows the extraordinary wealth of material in Zemk'inkomo Magwalandini. Indeed, one can suggest without undue exaggeration that Rubusana's anthology ranks with T. D. Mweli Skota's The African Yearly Register: Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of Black Folks in Africa (1930, a book located in New African modernity winking at New Negro modernity through its allusion to W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk [1903]), as the best intellectual representations of the construction of South African modernity. It would seem that Vilakazi takes issue with Rubusana by slapping Gqoba---an unacceptable gesture or procedure if ever there was one. Secondly, a much more serious objection to Vilakazi, is that nowhere in his magnificent dissertation does he document his critique that Gqoba's poetic voice was unoriginal. Jordan presents a contradistinctive evaluation through ample documentation. As though this were not sufficient, Jordan provides a full contextualization through complete periodization---Gqoba in relation to his predecessors, contemporariesand successors. Through Jordan, one can see the progression of the Xhosa poetic spirit across different literary period. What is at issue with Jordan is not so much the so-called unoriginality of Gqoba, as much as his growing poetic and intellectual pessimism, conservatism and defeatism, as the Europeans steadily subjugate Africans, and as modernity progressively announces its triumph over tradition. In other words, Gqoba was defeated by historical forces not fully comprehensible to him, similar to the tragic position of Mzilakazi in Solomon T. Plaatje's Mhudi (1930). Indeed the defeat was so 'complete' that when Gqoba died in 1888, the newspaper that he edited Isigidimi Sama Xhosa expired with him him in that same year, or perhaps week. By the time of his death, Jordan documents that for several previous several years Gqoba was unrelentingly, unapologetically and consistently attacked by younger new African intellectuals for his conservatism and defeatism. Perhaps among them was the young Walter B. Rubusana, who had already aligned himself with John Tengo Jabavu's newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, lauched in 1884. Within this fascinating context of intellectual interactions and duels, when Jordan writes: "The dominant figures of this period were Tiyo Soga, who wrote essays and a few short stories, and William W. Gqoba, essayist, historian, and poet"---the judgement is fully sustained. When A. C. Jordan alludes to Gqoba as a historian, it is to the fact that Gqoba wrote the only existant Xhosa account of the Nongqawuse tragic episode which he witnessed first-hand when he was barely seventeen-years old. What would seem to account for Benedict Wallet Vilakazi's peevishness towards the Xhosa formidable intellectual, is that in search of a modern lyrical predecessor, he found in Gqoba a philosophical meditative poet, something contrary to his wants and expectations. Having made this gestural rejection of William Wellington Gqoba, it is very astonishing to see Vilakazi in The Oral And Written Literature in Nguni paralyzed by a self-enduced ambivalent gaze at the great modern Xhosa lyric poet, S. E. K. Mqhayi. In this instance, the anxiety of influence seems to have been overwhelming. Lastly, the untenability of Vilakazi's position resides in that he evaluates only one aspect of Gqoba's creative imagination, severed from the totality of his fascinating intellectual endeavours. This defense on behalf of William Wellington Gqoba does not gainsay anything against the greatness of Benedict Wallet Vilakazi as an intellectual, for without him, E. H. A. Made, H. I. E. Dhlomo, A. C. Jordan himself, Jordan Kush Ngubane, Josiah Mapumulo, A. H. Ngidi, Mazisi Kunene and others, are not fully comprehensible. Wherein, then, lies the uniqueness of Gqoba! Jordan places it in the dialectic or transition from tradition to modernity. Both of Gqoba's long poems which were anthologized by Walter B. Rubusana, Discussion between the Christian and the Pagan (850 lines) and Great Discussion on Education (1,150 lines, were allegories about this historical divide. Gqoba was in many ways anticipatory, in that both the historical constructs of Christianity and education as pathways to modernity were to be among the central themes of the New African Movement from its advent in 1905 (through Pixley ka Isaka Seme's seminal "the Regeneration of Africa") to its violent termination in 1960, in the Sharpeville Massacre. Nevertheless, these two long poems do not necessarily represent the best imaginative work written by William Wellington Gqoba for as A. C. Jordan argues in Towards an African Literature the superlative work of this first modern Xhosa poetic voice appeared in W. G. Bennie's Xhosa anthology Imibengo (1936; Tit-bits) rather than in Rubusana's anthology. In some ways then, perhaps Gqoba is still as yet not fully known in his real completeness. | |