Mazizi Kunene, who died last week aged 76, was hailed as one of South Africa’s leading poets, and indeed Africa’s, having been declared the continent’s poet laureate by Unesco in 1993.
I recall, a decade or so ago, attending an awards function at which Kunene spoke. He lambasted today’s Zulu speakers for forgetting “classical” Zulu and letting the language degenerate. This utterance seems of a piece with his overall cultural project, which was to celebrate what he saw as African values and achievements; he viewed himself as an imbongi, connected to earlier oral poetic traditions and extending such forms in the modern era.
His most famous work, Emperor Shaka Zulu the Great, was an epic poem written in Zulu but published in English in his own adapted form. Kunene’s avowed project here, as Duncan Brown notes in his new book, To Speak of This Land, was to correct “propaganda and misrepresentation” by writing “an honest view” of Shaka, thereby helping build a “national ego” and contributing to nation-building. However, the work displays an inner tension between Zulu nationalism and a broader Africanism.
The poem contains fulsome tribute to Mangosuthu Buthelezi, but at the time Kunene, in exile, was a representative of the African National Congress in Europe and to the United Nations (and later its director of finance).
Kunene’s aristocratic family history gave him an investment in narratives of the Zulu kingdom, yet he proudly told the story of how Emperor Shaka (banned in South Africa after Kunene became a “listed person”) was used as an encouraging text by fighters in the camps of Umkhonto weSizwe.
Ironically, the book was published in 1979, the very year of Buthelezi’s final falling-out with his former sponsors in the ANC.
Emperor Shaka also seemed old-fashioned at a time when Black Consciousness had given black South African writing a radical shot in the arm — it felt “contradictory, anachronistic and distant because of its lofty idiom” and its “promotion of ‘tribal’ influences and forms”, writes Brown. Throughout his work, Kunene displayed an attachment to Zulu tradition and spirituality; his “sacramental world view”, notes Julia Martin, is shown in poems such as Journey to the Sacred Mountains (1982), where the poet finds “the voices of the ancient poets … basking in the legends of our Forefathers”.
Kunene was initially educated at the University of Natal, leaving South Africa in 1959 to study abroad. He later taught in Lesotho and California before returning in 1993 to teach at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. The purpose of African literature, he said in 1980, was “not merely to entertain, but primarily to teach social values and serious philosophical concepts”.
His first collection, Zulu Poems (1970), comprised his translations of his earlier Zulu poetry (he began writing at the age of 11). Emperor Shaka Zulu the Great was followed by Anthem of the Decades (1981) — another epic poem, this time about Africa’s leading women — and The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain (1982), a collection of lyric poems. After his return to South Africa, Kunene returned to writing in Zulu in Isibusiso sikamhawu (1994), Indiba yamancasakazi (1995) and Umzwilili wamaAfrika (1996).
Raymond Mazizi Kunene was born in Durban on May 12 1930, and died in Durban on August 12 2006