P Jordan: Memorial service for Mazisi Kunene

(read by Professor Keorapetse W Kgositsile)
19 August 2006

South Africa loses a literary giant

“There are men who find their hereafter
Among the people
You live forever in us
You are all the names
That in dying for life
Make life surer than death”

Those words are from A Luta Continua, a requiem for Duma Nokwe, a poem in
which Keorapetse Kgositsile responds to the death of a comrade he loved and
respected.

Mazisi Raymond Kunene was amongst the most important creative intellectuals
of 20th Century South Africa.

Born in Durban, KwaZulu Natal, on 12 May 1930, he began writing at an early
age. His first known works were published in newspapers and magazines when he
was aged 11. In 1956 he won the Bantu Literary Competition Award and earned a
Masters of Arts Degree from the University of Natal in 1959, after defending a
dissertation entitled “An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry, Both Traditional
and Modern”. That same year he left South Africa to take up a teaching post at
Roma College (the future University of Lesotho) in Lesotho.

After a brief stint in Lesotho, he travelled to Britain, planning to do his
doctorate. Events overtook that ambition and he was drawn into the politics of
the liberation movement becoming the African National Congress’s Chief
Representative in the United Kingdom and Western Europe in 1964. He served in
that capacity for a number of years before resuming his studies in the United
States of America, where he took up a post at the University of California, Los
Angeles in 1973. He finally became Professor of African Languages and
Literature at that campus, a post he held until his return to South Africa in
1993.

Mazisi Kunene was named South Africa’s Poet Laureate on the recommendation
of South Africa’s writers in March 2005.

Mazisi Kunene was an extremely talented artist whose inspiration was the
history of his people, especially the struggle for freedom and democracy
against a brutal system of colonialism, white domination and apartheid. He was
deeply rooted in the oral traditions and the indigenous literature of the Nguni
and Sotho speakers of southern Africa. An African writer-intellectual who was
both cosmopolitan and national, he was highly esteemed for his craft by his
contemporaries. He was also an uncompromising pan-Africanist, espousing an
African literary and cultural ethos. In the introduction to his first
anthology, “Zulu Poems”, a collection of poetry written first in isiZulu, then
translated into English by the poet himself, and published in 1979 he
noted:

“As the Zulu literary tradition had been devalued, I started writing without
models, until I discovered (B.W.) Vilakazi's poetry. When I became dissatisfied
with Vilakazi and others, I started my own metrical experiments based on the
recurrence of stress in the penultimate syllable. Finding this unsatisfactory,
I then experimented with syllabic metre, but eventually discarded all these
experiments in preference for an internal rhythm which I found in studying
traditional poetry. This is the method I have found most appropriate to Zulu
poetry"

Mazisi Kunene was both political activist and poet. During the years he
lived in exile he regularly featured at African and Afro-Asian cultural
conferences and wrote extensively for a number of journals. He was first
conferred the title of poet laureate by the government of Morocco during 1993
as a mark of recognition for his contribution to African literature. In
addition to employing his art as a tool in the liberation struggle, Mazisi
Kunene regarded the affirmation of an African aesthetic, especially with regard
to poetics, as an important dimension of the emancipation of the African
people, on the continent and in the diaspora, from the degrading stereotypes
and literary pretensions of the west. In an essay about the poet attached to
King Shaka’s court, Magolwane, which he published in 1967, Kunene remarks:

“…Magolwane’s poetry impresses itself in waves of meaning. The meaning which
is not only assumed in words, but also in the structure and form of the
poetry.”

The decades of 1980s and ‘90s were probably Kunene’s most prolific. He
produced eight major works, in both English and isiZulu, during this time. His
three epics, “Emperor Shaka the Great,” 1979; “Anthem of the Decade,” 1981, and
“The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain”, 1982, were received with critical
acclaim, and established him as one of Africa’s greatest literary figures. As
his colleague and long-time friend E’skia Mphahlele has correctly observed, for
years Kunene’s work is going to show us the way. And I would say that that
valuable body of work would show us the way whether from the present we wanted
to look at the past or at the future, or even at the present itself.

After his return home in 1993, his presence at a seminar or conference not
only breathed fire into the proceedings but also moved the young to hold fast
to their faith and craft by telling the story of Africa as it was known to her
own people. Steeped in African cosmology and the oral traditions of the region
he came from, he played a significant role in imparting a better understanding
of the pre-colonial African societies to both his students and the younger
generations. Last year a number of long overdue awards followed: in March the
Ministry of Arts and Culture thanked him for nurturing our hopes with his
poetry, as I said on that occasion, taking pride in anointing him South
Africa’s Poet Laureate. In June the M-Net Literary Awards honoured him with a
Lifetime Achievement Award, and in September the Indigenous Knowledge Systems
of South Africa Trust honoured him with a National Living Treasures Award.

As I said the night I took pride in naming Kunene democratic South Africa’s
first Poet Laureate:

“A renascent Africa is claiming its rightful place among the ancient
civilisations that have contributed to the corpus of humankind’s shared
patrimony of achievements in the arts, in science and the humanities. We owe
much of this to the efforts of our poets and writers who have never allowed
themselves to be discouraged by the racist myths and outright colonialist lies
asserting that ours is a continent that has no past worth remembering.”

Mazisi Kunene departs this life with seven of his works, portions of which
were assembled as a presentation by the Mazisi Kunene Foundation earlier this
year, as yet unpublished. With Kunene’s departure after a long illness, South
Africa and the continent have lost one their leading literary voices.

I offer my personal, heartfelt condolences to MmaThabo, his widow, and their
four children. On behalf of the Department of Arts and Culture let me say that
our hearts are with you in this moment of bereavement. Draw strength and
comfort from the thousands, here and in the wider world who mourn this sad loss
with you. The African soil from which he drew his inspiration will reclaim the
mortal remains of Mazisi Kunene, but his work will be an eternal monument to
his genius. Through his outstanding body of work Mazisi Kunene will live
forever in us.

Lala ngoxolo mfo wamaDlamini!

For further details, please contact: Sandile Memela
Spokesperson for Ministry of Arts and Culture
Cell: 082 800 3750

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
19 August 2006