In poetry of their misery
Twanumbee or Tuanambi. As with so many cases, the misspelling of non-European names complicates the identification of personal traces. According to the Red Cross register he was born in Port Elizabeth on April 8 1883 and was registered as a prisoner on October 16 1915.
In the written files of the commission, now held at the Lautarchiv (sound archives), Ntwanambi appears in an entry dated May 19 1917, when he was acoustically recorded by Meinhof and the philologist Wilhelm Doegen. According to the files of the Lautarchiv he had spent time in India after 1897. The protocol of his recording also states that he could read and write very little.
Only from the Red Cross files do we learn that he worked on a ship as a boilermaker.
During his recording, Ntwanambi did not sing of the war, having not seen the European battlefields. His chanting, melancholy voice instead
Ntwanambi’s lament
sings of being incarcerated in a camp, an experience he artfully compares with the phase of seclusion in the rites of initiation.
In his songs, the inmates of the camp become abakhwetha (initiates).
In Phindezwa Mnyaka’s translation and with her interpretation of the songs that were captured by the commission, the profound beauty of these compositions and their inherent wealth of associative poetics emerge. His, like many other men’s recorded voices, articulates aspects of their experiences in captivity of uncertainty and fear.
Despite their age, the recordings sound astoundingly clear. The acoustic recordings in isiXhosa include series of words spoken by Ntwanambi. One of these series gives away Meinhof’s search for the names of God in African languages (Thixo, uThixo … inkosi, inkosin …). Another registers the pronunciation of clicks in isiXhosa: Umngqungqo, ncwadi … yincwadi ... The songs that Ntwanambi sang were most probably recorded to get examples of “traditional” texts, and the flow of spoken language more generally.
Yet what was deemed a traditional song becomes interlaced with references to Ntwanambi’s situation of captivity, carrying a poignant sense of misery.
Ntwanambi’s chanting voice introduces the topic: “Initiates, there I go hungry! We go hungry, Father!” he sings. His repeated reference to constant hunger, which would have been blacked out in the outgoing letters of prisoners by the censors, sharply contradicts the propaganda photograph of happy, well-fed men.
In contrast to the letters, the spoken, recorded words were not censored. They were not meant to leave the enclosure of the “museum of voices” and the field of linguistic research for which they were recorded.
In one of the few publications of the Lautarchiv, (from 1936), Ntwanambi’s chanting voice, which sets the stage for his words, is dismissed as “meaningless ejaculations”. Listened to today, not as an example of a language to be registered and researched, but as a historical document that speaks of the presence and the experiences of African internees, it’s a narrative of Ntwanambi’s journey to the camp.
Whether he was released or whether he returned to South Africa I could not find out.