INTRODUCTION

Harold Scheub

This volume contains four oral histories and a number of oral poems.^[1] Two of the histories are of nations: Mdukiswa Tyabashe's history of the Mpondomise, Ndumiso Bhotomane's history of the Gcaleka (both are Xhosa peoples, now located in the Transkei in southern Africa). And there is a history of the peoples of the Transkei by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani. The other is a history of an individual and his struggle against the colonial powers: a Zulu historian's view of Chakijana, a Zulu freedom fighter. The four oral histories are composed of narratives. In their structure, they belong to the imaginative narrative traditions or Xhosa and Zulu cultures. Whatever the historian seeks to convey to the members of his audience, he does so by means of narratives artistically crafted and organized, each narrative effectively related to the other.

Ndumiso Bhotomane's narrative technique is readily seen. In the first part of his performance, he provides his audience with genealogical materials: names of kings, their right-hand houses, their minor houses, their burial places, their favored oxen. That accomplished, and within that framework, Bhotomane can turn to narrative: Gcaleka problems with the whites and the Mfengu, the story of Nongqawuse, the Ngcayechibi War, the Gqunukhwebe people. Each narrative is developed separately, but within the context that the historian has earlier established with his genealogies. The one depends on the other, grows out of the other, and from time to time, in the midst of the narratives, Bhotomane returns to the genealogies. They are his touchstones.

This narrative technique is artfully developed in the Zulu historian's vivid depiction of the activities of Chakijana. It is interesting to compare this Zulu's view of Chakijana with Chakijana's own description of his activities---at least, as far as he wanted the white authorities to understand them. This historian's conception of Chakijana is more dramatic and heroic than that cannily reflected in Chakijana's legal deposition. In this oral history, the performer selects a villain who will move through the sequence of narratives---the white man. The whites provide effective material against which the various stories about Chakijana and his trickster derring-do are developed. Trickster is initially introduced, his relations with the whites sketched in, then the series of narratives each dealing with one of Chakijana's brilliant escapades is set in motion. What emerges, of course, is not the Chakijana that he himself sought to establish in his courtroom testimony: the trickster is obviously at work there also, attempting to persuade his white captors that he was but a messenger in a vast operation run by the king himself. This Zulu historian, who wished to remain anonymous, has quite a different view of this guerrilla, this Chakijana who knew his enemies well, this double agent who worked Briton against Boer, and who, in his relations with the white overlords, caught the imagination of the Zulu people.

It is the genius of the poet-historian Mdukiswa Tyabashe that effectively combines these various elements of historical narrative. He deals not with a single person, nor does he concentrate on a few separate incidents involving the Mpondomise. He attempts here the full sweep of Mpondomise history, its beginnings, the early Mpondomise constructing a kingdom out of their Mbo past, working to the fullness of power, and then an awesome decline. But Tyabashe is working within the same oral tradition as Bhotomane and Ngcobo; his history is also developed by means of narrative. Unlike Bhotomane, he does not develop genealogy and narrative separately; he combines them, as indeed many southern African oral historians do. As practiced by Tyabashe, the tradition is identical in its composition to the intsomi and inganekwane imaginative narrative traditions of the Xhosa and Zulu. In fact, Tyabashe openly introduces iintsomi into his ibali (history), combining the genres richly and productively. It is the combination of historical and imaginative narratives that characterizes Mdukiswa Tyabashe's oral technique. It is his poetic ability, his brilliance as an oral bard in the courts of Mpondomise kings, that enables him to link these different categories of narrative, to blend them into a history that reveals the essence of the Mpondomise way of life---ubuMpondomise. Tyabashe tells the history of the Mpondomise, but his desire is to do more: he wishes to capture the greatness of the Mpondomise past and to harness it to alter the drab and unpromising present. Like many Xhosa poets, historians and storytellers, Tyabashe is a revolutionary. He is revolutionary in his poetry, he is no less so in the narratives of history. He does not even touch on the modem Mpondomise leaders: his history ends with Mhlontlo. For him, that was the end; Mhlontlo was the last great king. Tyabashe's use of genealogy is not as obvious as in Bhotomane's history. But genealogy is there, a chronological movement from the earliest of the Mbo leaders to Mhlontlo and Mditshwa. Still, the meaningful structure is in the narratives, evoked within and against the genealogical data.