Nation's Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho

ISBN-13: 9781868144518 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 508 str.

Jeff Opland

Opis

For nearly a decade Nontsizi Mgqwetho contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu, the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa. Apart from what is revealed in these writings, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman's poetry on October 23, 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from. Nothing more is heard from her, but the poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. The Nation's Bounty contains the original poems alongside English translations by Jeff Opland. Jeff Opland is research fellow in the Department of African Languages at the University of South Africa (South Africa) and Research Associate in the Department of Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (UK).