Voices in the Whirlwind and other Essays

221 Pages·1972·16.519 MB·English

by  Ezekiel Mphahlele (auth.)

V oices in the Whirlwind
and Other Essays
Voices
in the
Whirlwind
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE
Pal grave Macmillan
© EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE 1967, 1969, 197~
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1972 978-0-333-13160-2
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION
MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED, IN ANY FORM OR
BY ANY MEANS, WlTHOUT PERMISSlON.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES 1972
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNlTED KINGDOM AND EAST AFRICA 1973
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in New York Dublin
Melboume Johannesburg and Madras
ISBN 978-1-349-81572-2 ISBN 978-1-349-81570-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-81570-8
"African Literature: What Tradition?" originally appeared in the Dllnver
Quarterly
"The Fabric of African Cultures" originally appeared in Foreign AtJairs.
Copyright © 1964 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
"African Writers and Cornrnitrnent" originally appeared as "Writers and Corn
mitrnent" in Black Orpheus
"Censorship in South Africa" originaUy appeared in Censorship Toda.,
The paperback edition of this book Is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be
lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher's prior consent, in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a
aimilar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
FOR DENNIS BRUTUS:
You stopped a fascist bullet.
FOR KGOSITSILE:
Your "borrowed fears"
are also mine-
and so your questionings.
FOR GWENDOLYN BROOKS:
Thanks for the incisive image.
You are a focus of
the many streams of Black reality;
Your heart straddles
the times of unobtrusive grief
to times of rage;
rendering the drama
You bring home the meaning.
FOR CHABI AND Puso:
My youngest two:
the whirlwind's coming
to meet you
my sons.
Don't ever let it hug you
twist you hurt you.
It's none too soon
to learn the signs:
see that bird over there
poised on a wingspan
to ride the storm-
the bird knows its enemies:
that's the abc of it,
sons.
It's never too soon.
Contents
Voices in the Whirlwind: Poetry and Conflict in the Black
World I
African Literature: What Tradition? I2I
The Fabric of African Cultures I52
Implications of Color Identity in Pan-Africanism I70
African Writers and Commitment I85
Censorship in South Africa I99
Voices in the Whirlwind: Poetry
and Conflict in the Black World
In 1945 I began teaching English and Afrikaans in a Johannes-
burg high school. The students did not use textbooks. The
teacher wrote poems out of his textbook on the board for stu-
dents to copy into a hardcover notebook. They had then to
look for pictures in magazines and so on to paste in their books,
taking care that the picture that the student thought "illus-
trated" a poem appeared on the page opposite the text. You
might thus find a picture of an ox-drawn covered wagon (a
symbol of the frontier days of Boer life) opposite a vitriolic anti-
British, anti-African poem in Afrikaans! The school inspectors
who, in that supervisory position, had to be white gave marks
for the way the student had arranged his anthology and the
pictures he used. Then there was an oral examination, during
which the students were to recite some of the verses from mem-
ory. We found out that white children were taught in the same
way in their schools.
At the matriculation level-the last two years of high school
-we used printed texts for poetry courses. Students were ex-
pected to be taught to appreciate poetry-after three years of
desperately trying to see poetry in pictorial terms! Again, at
this stage, Africans wrote the same examinations as the whites,
although in separate schools. It was a ridiculous and frustrating
method of teaching poetry. The whites did not question it.
When we, the Africans, could have, we were plunged into edu-
cational politics involving the rejection of a system of inferior
schooling the government was imposing on blacks-an inferior
1
Voices in the Whirlwind
curriculum now sanctioned by law. But that is another story.
Twelve years later, when I taught English literature in the
Department of Extramural studies at the University of Ibadan,
Nigeria, I came face to face with the problem of teaching poetry
to adults, most of whom wanted to finish high school and
thereby improve their marketability in employment. I realized
that they had been taught merely to recite poetry in the earlier
years of their schooling. What kind of poetry? Wordsworth (in-
cluding "Daffodils"), Tennyson, Keats, and so on!
An idea struck me that I might begin by leading them
through an inquiry into poetry as a heightened and condensed
form of expression, whether in verse or prose. I had to lead
them to the idea of poetry as a state of mind first. They had to
understand that poetry was nothing new to Africa (which sur-
prised them!), that every human being of average intelligence
has poetic states of mind at different times, i.e., every person,
literate or illiterate, at one time or another perceives things and
events poetically. He sees something behind the initial stimulus,
or meanings radiate or vibrate from the thing perceived; that
what we read as poetry is merely the work of the literate, a
sophisticated activity.
What better way of demonstrating these states of mind than
by examining African idiomatic speech? So I asked each student
to write down as many metaphors and proverbs as he could
think up, each in the original language. Then they were to give
a literal English translation for the benefit of the whole class.
We examined several of these items of figurative speech. It be-
came clear to the class that each time a person uttered such
speech in everyday life, it was either in circumstances of ritual
or it was a way of lending gravity or importance to what was
being said, even in humorous circumstances. The speaker would
be wanting to strike at more meanings than one at any time.
There was a conscious or unconscious attempt to synthesize, to
see things as a whole, made up of interconnected elements.
A saying from my own language (Sesotho) that is used by a
man's representatives during negotiations for a bride is "We
have come to ask for a calabash." This is part of a ritual. It ac-
Voices in the Whirlwind: Poetry and Conflict 3
centuates, like the rest of the poetry that will be used from then
on, the gravity of the moment, the sense of traditional propriety.
A calabash holds fresh water or milk or beer-all sources of
nourishment, a possible expression of generosity. These suggest
the woman's womb, her giving and receiving capacities. The
calabash is smooth on the outside: a woman should have such
a smooth skin that a tear should roll down easily on it. The
calabash is fragile: a woman should not be kicked around.
When a guest has eaten enough and his host wants to know,
the former will say, "Yes, after all you do not eat until you grow
horns."
At this point, the students relive poetry at its basic level. We
go on to African oral poetry and then on to the written poetry
of Africa and other parts of the world. By now we have come
to grasp the idea of poetry as a language.
This method has never failed me: it worked for me and
younger participants at subsequent writers' workshops in East
Africa.
My encounter with American Negro poetry set me thinking
about a number of things: it set me asking further questions
about the meaning and function of poetry. So I embarked upon
the exploration that follows. It is a poetry born out of situations
of political controversy or conflict. And I want to find out how
the American Negro poetic performance seeks to answer the
questions implied in the goals so much of it has set for itself.
The African poetry is included for purposes of comparison. It
it a verse that consciously challenges political authority, which
in turn differs from territory to territory, from culture to cul-
ture. David Diop pits himself against French colonial authority;
Dennis Brutus stands opposed to white authority that is based
not overseas but in South Africa itself; Wole Soyinka's conflict
is with a newly established black authority.
I am also aware that my earlier students of poetry will be
wrestling with the same problems, once having gone over the
hurdle of understanding the workings of poetry as a language,
the basic roots of it: problems concerning poetry that, con-
4 Voices in the Whirlwind
sciously or unconsciously, seeks to meet sociopolitical impera-
tives of a contemporary order; problems concerning overtly
public poetry and that which arrives at a communal sensibility
via the individual experience or vision of the writer.
The world has been searching for the meaning of poetry for
centuries. But in each phase of history we find ourselves asking
what poetry does or can do for mankind. Because at each stage
we find our physical and other needs and wants have grown
more complex and problematic. We feel disoriented and con-
fused. We look back in tradition to see whether some of its
lessons apply to our time. We have long given up the idea that
was noisily started by the F. R. Leavis set and published in
Scrutiny in 1932-the idea that "there is a necessary relation-
ship between the quality of the individual's response to art and
his general fitness for a humane existence." Neither our percep-
tion of the "unified sensibility" in literature nor the critic's
revelation of this seems to have influenced for the better the
corporate will of a society, even in countries where literature
has been produced in written form for centuries. It has not, for
instance, been a brake on the march of racism, fascism, the ac-
quisitive drive and its corollary, the rat race, in developed
countries.
When African and other pre-industrial communities in the
world recited praise poetry and folk tales, sang ballads, drama-
tized healing processes, ancestral worship; when society had not
yet disintegrated, there could never have been talk about a
"unified sensibility": it was a natural thing. Now the world is
divided into camps-capitalists, socialists, the haves and have-
nots, Protestants, Catholics, humanists, workers, employers, ag-
nostics, atheists, Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, blacks,
whites, pacifists, and so on-conflict has become the order of
the day, even while economics blur some of the frontiers.
Poetry is a state of mind, so it tends to be a ready tool for the
expression or dramatization of protest and indignation and ex-
hortation for many who regard themselves as poets. And we
write a poetry we hope will communicate emotion, move our
readers in some direction, or sharpen their awareness.