Bring up Vilakazi Street in Orlando West, Soweto, and the thought that comes to mind is that it is the only street in the world that boasts two Nobel Prize winners: Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Nelson Mandela.
But there is another reason the street ought to matter. It is named after African languages activist and one of South Africa’s earliest black intellectuals, Benedict Wallet, better known to readers of Zulu poetry as BW Vilakazi.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Vilakazi’s birth. And in case you were one of those embarrassed to admit scant knowledge of the first black South African to be awarded a doctorate in literature, take heart.
His grandson, Khulani Vilakazi, says his family is also trying to establish who their grandfather really was. Vilakazi died in 1947, a year after completing his doctorate. The thesis was on The Oral and Written Literature in Nguni.
Says Khulani: “The family does not know him that much, he died when my father was about four years old. BW’s parents died when he was young and my father died when I was three. He was 38. So it is difficult for us as a family to come up with personal anecdotes about what type of man he was. We acknowledge him as our great ancestor but, to be honest, he never had enough time with his family.”
The Dr BW Vilakazi Project has, since the beginning of the year, initiated commemoration events around the country to celebrate Vilakazi’s cultural and intellectual contributions. It is also a good time to commemorate his memory with the debate on the use of African languages as a medium of instruction again occupying centre stage in academic and political circles.
Ntongela Masilela, professor of English and world literature, an expert on Vilakazi’s work, says he was not only a gentle cultural icon, but a feisty intellectual when the need arose.
“Vilakazi viewed language and classicism as intellectual and cultural weapons for shaping and constructing a modern culture in South Africa. Although he seemed to have been a gentle person and was liked by many, if not by most of his contemporaries, he was very combative regarding intellectual matters,” says Masilela.
“HIE Dhlomo [a leading African, intellectual writer and poet] seems to have had high anxiety about Vilakazi’s intellectual combativeness, given the famous intellectual duel between them in 1938 and 1939. The undercurrents of this fight were already there in the early 1930s.
“Basically, the contention between them was Dhlomo’s persistence in writing his creative work in the English language rather than in isiZulu, as Vilakazi believed should be the case in the instance of Zulu intellectuals, writers and artists.”
Vilakazi attacked Dhlomo in 1938, arguing vehemently over the role of “Bantu” writers and their work.
“By Bantu drama, I mean a drama written by a Bantu, for the Bantu, in a Bantu language. I do not class English or Afrikaans dramas on Bantu themes, whether or not these are written by black people, as contributions to Bantu literature.
“I have an unshaken belief in the possibilities of Bantu languages and their literature, provided the Bantu writers themselves can learn to love their languages and use them as vehicles for thought, feeling and will,” wrote Vilakazi in journals Bantu Studies and The South African Outlook.
Born Bambatha ka Mshini in Groutville, near KwaDukuza (formerly Stanger) in KwaZulu-Natal, in the same year as the Bambatha rebellion, Vilakazi changed his name to Benedict Wallet after the family converted to Roman Catholicism.
As prize for the conversion, BW was awarded a place at the then prestigious Marianhill school. After spending some time at a seminary training for priesthood, Vilakazi felt his was a different vocation.
Masilela identified this period as a turning point in Vilakazi’s religious and intellectual life. “Vilakazi’s Catholicism was intellectual rather than religious, because it came from two brilliant Zulu intellectuals of the 1920s who were Catholics: AHM Ngidi and Josiah Mapumulo.
“In an essay of 1933, in which he reflects on his intellectual formation, Vilakazi recollects that reading the articles and essays by these two intellectuals in the pages of Ilanga lase Natal newspaper was what led him into his intellectual vocation,” says Masilela.
The exposure to “Western civilisation” aroused the Zulu pride in Vilakazi. Through his poetry, he would register his angst over the rural-urban divide, and how industrialisation was changing life as he knew it. The emasculation of black men, particularly in the mining “compounds” was to leave an indelible mark on a man who had left a strongly patriarchal and regimented life in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
“He took it as his mission — saw himself as sent by the ancestors — to preserve and develop the Zulu language. His poem, Ngizwa Ingoma, speaks to that feeling, of a person anointed,” says Khulani.
After arriving in Jo’burg to take up a post as a lecturer assistant at Wits University in 1935, Vilakazi suffered the taunts of other African academics who dismissed his University of South Africa, bachelor of arts qualification as a “candlelight degree”.
“I think that made him want to prove a point. That is why, three years later, he had completed his master’s — his thesis was Conception and Development of Poetry in Zulu.
Vilakazi, though never overtly political, was inspired by African National Congress founding president John Langalibalele Dube — particularly his drive to get Africans to do things themselves instead of waiting for missionaries to lend a hand.
He also used his connection to Dube to publish a lot of his poetry in Dube’s Ilanga lase Natal newspaper.
Says Khulani: “Maybe there is something in the name Bambatha. Unlike the other Bambatha, my grandfather was the warrior with a pen.”