POETIC LICENCE
Perhaps the obvious topic to write about this week is Bob Dylan’s appointment as Nobel Prize laureate for literature. But no, Bob can wait for now. Instead I’ll write of another laureate entirely. Last week I was in Durban for the 20th festival of Poetry Africa. Coincidentally, this year also marks 200 years since the founding of the Zulu Kingdom.
Mazisi Kunene, South Africa’s first Poet Laureate, wrote a vast body of literary work, almost all of it by hand and in isiZulu. For 34 (from 1959) he lived in exile, first in the UK and then in the US, where he taught African history and Zulu at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He returned to South Africa in 1993.
His most famous work is Emperor Shaka the Great: a Zulu Epic which has drawn admiring comparisons with Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey. While visiting Kunene’s family home, now the Mazisi Kunene Foundation, I listened to a recording of part of this superb verse narrative and was reminded of the soaring cadences of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Wonderful.
Of course, I could only listen to the English translation, not the original isiZulu, but it moved me profoundly. Astonishingly, the poem was first published in Japanese before eventually finding its English publication in 1979.
The Mazisi Kunene Foundation does great educational and social work with young people, emphasising respect for African languages, literature and traditions. Mathabo Kunene, the writer’s wife, speaks passionately about preserving and enhancing her husband’s lifelong commitment to these and other causes. I was deeply impressed.
The angry title question of this poem remains to be answered, but Kunene’s literary life demanded that it should be asked:
Was I Wrong?
Was I wrong when I thought All shall be avenged? Was I wrong when I thought The rope of iron holding the neck of young bulls Shall be avenged? Was I wrong When I thought the orphans of sulphur Shall rise from the ocean? Was I depraved when I thought there need not be love, There need not be forgiveness, there need not be progress, There need not be goodness on the earth, There need not be towns of skeletons, Sending messages of elephants to the moon? Was I wrong to laugh asphyxiated ecstasy When the sea rose like quicklime When the ashes on ashes were blown by the wind When the infant sword was left alone on the hill top? Was I wrong to erect monuments of blood? Was I wrong to avenge the pillage of Caesar? Was I wrong? Was I wrong? Was I wrong to ignite the earth And dance above the stars Watching Europe burn with its civilisation of fire, Watching America disintegrate with its gods of steel, Watching the persecutors of mankind turn into dust Was I wrong? Was I wrong?
Bob Dylan, from an entirely different cultural background, could not have expressed the feelings more powerfully. Then there is this extract, reminding us that, like it or not, we all emerge from “the womb of the universe”:
In Praise of the Ancestors
They are the mystery that envelopes our dream. They are the power that shall unite us. They are the strange truth of the earth. They come from the womb of the universe.
MazisiKunene
FromZuluPoems(1970)andTheAncestorsandtheSacred Mountain(1982)