Of Land, Bones, and Money

Toward a South African Ecopoetics

Emily McGiffin

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813942759
• eBook ISBN: 9780813942773
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to segregation, apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa.

Emily McGiffin first discusses the history of the amaXhosa people and the environment of their homelands before moving on to the arrival of the British, who began a relentless campaign annexing land and resources in the region. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and postcolonial ecocriticism, she considers isiXhosa poetry in translation within its cultural, historical, and environmental contexts, investigating how these poems struggle with the arrival and expansion of the exploitation of natural resources in South Africa and the entrenchment of profoundly racist politics that the process entailed. In contemporary South Africa, iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity. Their ongoing practice of producing complex, spiritually rich literature continues to have a profound social effect, contributing directly to the healing and well-being of their audiences, to political transformation, and to environmental justice.

1

A Brief History of isiXhosa Literature

Okukwazi onako nje Sel’ udume wacand’ izwe,— Lemihlaba, eliwonga Uzizuze ngabani na?

With all your information still famous across the nations— who was it who gave you the means to acquire these lands, this status? —WILLIAM WELLINGTON GQOBA

Prior to European contact, the tip of the African continent that forms present-day South Africa was peopled by a variety of cultural and ethnic groups. The various San or “bushman” nations (e.g., !Kung, ǀXam, ǂKhomani), are descendants of the earliest human inhabitants of the region who had lived in southern Africa for some two hundred thousand years.1 These peoples lived for generations as hunter-gatherers who ranged across southern Africa before they began to be displaced by the pastoralist Khoi people. The origins of the Khoi are unknown, but they are thought to have migrated from present-day Namibia or Botswana with domesticated herds that they had acquired through contact with pastoralist peoples in these regions.2 The Khoi settled throughout the area that is now the Western Cape and were the first South Africans to come into contact with Europeans—first the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch—as the latter arrived and settled in the area around Table Bay. Around CE 1500, Bantu-speaking peoples joined South Africa’s ethnic blend as they moved south with their cattle from the Great Lakes region of East Africa. Their arrival was part of an enormous, incremental human migration that began around 3000 BCE in the borderlands of what is now Nigeria and Cameroon, eventually resulting in the settlement of most of the African subcontinent by agrarian peoples.3

This brief historical sketch hints at the relationships that humans have developed with South African landscapes over millennia, illustrating how human modes of living and interacting with the environment of the region changed continually as new migrants introduced different livelihoods, languages, cultures, and spiritual practices. Yet all of these peoples lived in close contact with the diverse biogeographies of the lands they inhabited. It was not until the arrival of Europeans from the late fifteenth century onward that changes to human ways of relating to each other and to the landscape around them became increasingly drastic.

In precolonial times South Africa was home to dense populations of large mammals—elephants, rhinos, giraffes, many species of antelopes, zebras, buffalos, and lions—enormous quantities of birds and fish, and some of the most complex and diverse plant communities found anywhere in the world. The arrival of Europeans, with their horses, firearms, and superior killing capacity, quickly saw the region’s large, diverse populations of mammalian fauna diminish to a shadow of what they had been.4 European settlers went on to transform the landscape itself, establishing towns, cities, and networks of roads and railways, converting complex ecosystems to simplified cropping systems and setting up extractive industries that altered not only the biota of the country but also vast expanses of its very bedrock. Grazing by the settlers’ large herds of cattle and sheep intensified the environmental effects that had begun with the earlier arrival of African pastoralists. The speed of change increased drastically in the late eighteenth century as the British took control of the Cape colony and began a relentless annexation of land and resources. As colonial administrations parceled the rural landscape into private allotments, human settlement and transhumance patterns changed dramatically, reflecting concurrent processes of upheaval in Britain and Europe.5 Newly introduced plant species proliferated, and the erection of tens of thousands of kilometers of fences changed the movements and presence of game and the seasonal movements of pastoralists, all transforming precolonial ecosystems.6

This chapter introduces the people at the center of the present study, namely the amaXhosa and their poets. Drawing on previous scholarship and my own fieldwork, I offer a sketch of the environment and language of the amaXhosa, reserving historical events following the arrival of Europeans for subsequent chapters. From these background considerations that are important to the study, I move into a general discussion of the tradition of the iimbongi and the izibongo genre based on past scholarship. The research I present in subsequent chapters complicates some of this previous work, placing renewed emphasis on the importance of the spiritual and healing roles of the iimbongi and their poetry and questioning the role of activist poets in a political climate that stifles dissent.

The amaXhosa and Their Poetry

The term amaXhosa designates a diverse group of isiXhosa-speaking kingdoms—including the amaGcaleka, amaRharhabe, amaMpondo, abaThembu, amaBomvana, amaXesibe, amaMpondomise, and amaMfengu—whose traditional lands cover much of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.7 EmaXhoseni, the lands traditionally inhabited by the amaXhosa people, is a fertile and biodiverse region that consists largely of temperate grasslands on shallow clay soils that are better suited to livestock than intensive cropping.8 Like their amaZulu neighbors to the northeast, the amaXhosa lived as settled agrarians who set cattle at the heart of their culture—a lifestyle for which their undulating landscape, with its varied blend of well-watered bushveld and pasturage, is ideal.9 EmaXhoseni spans four climatic zones running parallel to one another between the Indian Ocean and the mountains that separate the coastal zone from the dry interior plateau. While many amaXhosa settled in the coastal area, the majority lived in the highlands beyond, settling amid smaller mountain ranges along river basins that boast rich soils, mixed pasturage, and abundant rainfall.10

Each of the amaXhosa kingdoms takes its name from an ancestor from which the lineage is descended, and each traditionally occupied a different area: the amaGcaleka and amaRharhabe resided in the south between the Sundays and Mbashe Rivers; the amaMpondo dwelt near the border of what is now KwaZulu-Natal; the abaThembu claimed the northern interior of the province, and so on.11 Each kingdom has its own unique history, genealogy, dialect, and set of cultural and livelihood practices specifically adapted to its home place. While some scholars have highlighted these differences by limiting their definition of amaXhosa to those groups who trace their lineage to the ancestor uXhosa (i.e., the amaGcaleka and amaRharhabe kingdoms), in this study I use the term amaXhosa to refer to all groups that speak the isiXhosa language.12

The amaXhosa kingdoms are in turn made up of chiefdoms, villages, and clans. Chiefs, particularly the paramount chief (king), preside over their territories by sacral and hereditary rights.13 Traditionally, and in many regions of the contemporary Eastern Cape, everyone lived in a chiefdom, and the relationship between chiefs and their people was, and remains, complex. As direct descendants of the ancient founders of the chiefdom, chiefs are endowed with profound obligations to oversee and provide for the solidarity of the community and the welfare of its members. In contemporary times, chiefs remain much more than symbolic figureheads; in rural areas in particular the chief continues to hold layered significance, in a sense embodying the spirits of landscape and community and helping to maintain harmonious relationships between these entities.14 At the same time, they are problematic figures whose hold on undemocratic power has been harshly criticized by a variety of commentators.

Clans are a further grouping in amaXhosa society. The clan name, iziduko, is additional to a person’s surname and reflects a further ancestral affiliation shared with a larger group than the immediate family, linking a person to the genealogy of the clan and to other clan members in their local community and beyond. (For example, Nelson Mandela is often referred to by his clan name, Madiba, as a gesture bestowing honor on both Mandela and the ancestor for whom his clan is named.)15 Due to traditional exogamy rules that forbid intermarriages between members of the same clan, neighboring households in both rural and urban areas tend to have a variety of clan affiliations.

The second-most widely spoken language in South Africa after isiZulu, isiXhosa is one of four closely related Nguni languages in South Africa, including isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiSwati, and isiNdebele. The Nguni languages are in turn part of the Bantu language group spoken by peoples across sub-Saharan Africa, an area stretching from the Cameroon coast east across the continent to Kenya and south to the Cape, a distribution that reflects past human migrations.16 The total number of languages in this group is unknown—largely because in many cases it is difficult to draw a clear line between languages and dialects as distinctions developed in other locales are often inappropriate for African contexts; however, linguists put the number of languages at about five hundred, which are spoken by some 240 million people in twenty-seven African countries.17 When Bantu peoples reached the lands that currently comprise South Africa around the beginning of the sixteenth century, they encountered indigenous Khoi and San peoples, and the interaction between the groups resulted in the transmission of clicks into the Nguni languages. In many Khoisan languages the percentage of click words may be over 60 percent; in isiXhosa and isiZulu, clicks are present in about 15 to 17 percent of words.18

IsiXhosa is an agglutinative language in which various prefixes and suffixes are joined to root words to alter their meaning. For example, ukufunda is the infinitive form of the verb “to study” or “to read,” ndiyafunda is the gerund “I am studying,” while andifundi is the negative “I am not studying.” Umfundi is a student, and umfundisi is a priest; ukufundela means “to study for,” and ukufundisa “to teach,” while ukufundisana means “to teach each other,” and so on. Like other related languages, isiXhosa nouns fall into classes. Most Bantu languages have about fifteen or sixteen noun classes arranged in about ten singular/plural pairings.19 IsiXhosa itself has six singular classes, six plural classes, and two abstracted classes that lack plural forms. In isiXhosa the noun is the dominant part of speech that determines the form of subject and object, possessive pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, which each must in turn adopt specific concords depending on the class of the noun. Concords are drawn from the noun prefix and contain similar combinations of sounds.20 The examples below illustrate how prefixes are added to noun, verb, and adjectival stems to create concords within sentences:

Umntwana wam omhle uyadlala. (My beautiful child is playing.)

Abantwana bam abahle bayadlala. (My beautiful children are playing.)

In these sentences, the root word for child, –ntwana, changes class depending on whether it is singular or plural, while the prefixes of associated adjectives, possessives, and verbs are altered accordingly. Similarly,

Inja yam entle iyadlala. (My beautiful dog is playing.)

Izinja zam ezintle ziyadlala. (My beautiful dogs are playing.)

Clearly, the arrangement of concords makes the language highly alliterative. The agglutinative structure also enables any given word to express a single object or idea or to contain complex sets of relationships and ideas in a compound that may be the equivalent of multiple English words. The result is that in many cases complicated concepts or even simple actions can be expressed much more succinctly and eloquently than in English. For example, during an interview with King Zwelonke, I asked a question that he had answered previously, and Zwelonke’s graceful reply was “Besendibethile” (We have already discussed that). This single word contains the verb, the past tense, the collective subject of the action, the direct object, and a sense of polite formality and eloquent dignity captured in the slightly archaic form. The isiXhosa language is thus well suited to poetic diction in its musicality, inherent alliteration, and subtle conveyance of conditional, subjunctive, past, and future tenses. Like any language, it is also rich in idiom and figurative constructions, many of which derive from the amaXhosa peoples’ connections with their environments.21

The isiXhosa language includes fifteen click consonants that are often used alliteratively by iimbongi. In the written language, clicks are denoted through combinations of roman consonants. Principally, there are three clicks enunciated with varying degrees of nasality or aspiration. C alone or in combination with other consonants (ch, nc, ngc, etc.) denotes forms of the frontal click, in which the tongue is sucked against the back of the front teeth to make a “tsk” sound. Q (qh, gq, etc.) indicates a palatal click, in which the tongue is sucked against the roof of the mouth and then snapped away sharply to produce a loud pop or egg-cracking sound. X (xh, nx, etc.) indicates a side click, in which the side of the mouth is clicked against the molars. In the isiXhosa language h is always voiced and indicates aspiration: thus ph is an aspirated p, rather than an equivalent of f, while th is an aspirated t, not the English dental frictive of “this” or “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Brief History of isiXhosa Literature
• 2 Verse, Violence, and the Migrant Labor System
• 3 Black Mamba and the Durban/Rural Nexus
• 4 Versions of Silence
• 5 Literature, Iimbongi, and Ideologies of Development
• 6 Land Expropriation without Compensation and the Vocal Dispossessed
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. FOSATU, by Alfred Themba Qabula
• Appendix B. Isibongo Performed at the State of the Nation Address, 2016
• Appendix C. Izibongo Performed by Thukela Poswayo
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index