“The Gwarrie Call that they Recognise”: An analysis of the translated Sesotho poem “Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914” (War against Germany 1914) by BM Khaketla (1913–2001)

This essay looks at a recently translated poem, “Ntwa ea Jeremane 1914”, written by BM Khaketla, as a lens through which to approach the feelings and attitudes of people from Lesotho towards the world wars. A poem is sometimes described as a gathering of spoken or written words, arranged in such a way that it evokes an intense imaginative alertness around an issue, an emotion or an experience. Investigations into the participation of black South Africans in the world wars mainly rest on official archival documentation, with attention focused on the racial, socio-economic context and the post-war treatment of soldiers. Distinction is seldom made between black South Africans and those from Lesotho (or Swaziland or Botswana) as they were all drafted under the South African contingents. There has been little discussion in South African art about why black people joined the Allied forces during the world wars, with the prominence of the sinking of the SS Mendi a wonderful exception as it reverberates in SEK Mqhayi's famous poem, “Ukutshona kuka Mendi”, as well as Fred Khumalo's recent novel, Dancing the Death Drill (2017). The visual artist William Kentridge has also commemorated the death of very large numbers of black Africans in the First World War in his powerful exhibition, The Head and the Load. This article explores the expression of emotions and conclusions about the world wars in a poem by Khaketla, as well as the techniques he uses to carry these across larger vistas

To Write Liberty

The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and to refrain from appropriating the pain of the marginalised. Taking a cue from Isaiah Berlin’s analysis of the two kinds of liberties: liberty to be free and liberty from interference with freedom, an argument is made for the freedom of a writer to write what she wants. This freedom is radically tempered in a reading of some novels by JM Coetzee. Here I explore the quality of skill, anguish and powerlessness to which a writer has to submit within the structure of her text

Interview: A case for sheer compulsive and imaginative depth

No Abstrac

‘… oi, oi! … you must go by the right path’: Mofolo’s Chaka revisited via the original text

Thomas Mofolo never defended himself against accusations that his novel Chaka distorts historical facts to express anti-Nguni sentiments under the guise of Christianity. But in a way he foreshadowed the possibility of it, by including as part of his novel a sentence which has become one of his most analysed: “But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his [Chaka’s] life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose”. Mofolo does not elaborate on what he means by “our present purpose”, but simply continues with the story. By focusing on the original Sesotho text, indigenous Zulu customs, African philosophy and the diversions from historical facts, this article explores other possibilities for what could have been Mofolo’s “present purpose”. My reading is that he tries to plumb what comprises ethical behaviour within a traditionally-valued, pre-Christian ethos, making Chaka arguably one of the earliest philosophical, ethical investigations via the form of the novel on the African continent

'This thing called reconciliation…' Forgiveness as part of an interconnectedness-towards-wholeness

Regular reference is made, within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the fact that ubuntu, an indigenous world view, played a role in the process. This paper tries to show that despite these references, important analysts of the TRC (as well as many South Africans) had insufficiently accounted for this worldview in their critical readings of the Commission’s work and therefore found aspects of the process incoherent and/or morally and legally confused. I am not arguing that the TRC was not a deeply flawed process, but want to establish how powerfully this indigenous world view brought a coherency that not only enabled the TRC to do its work without incidences of revenge, but imbued politically and legally trapped concepts with new possibilities. The pervasiveness of this world view within eg. the second round of TRC testimonies is noticeable and show how often the critique on the TRC fails to take this dominant role into account and how many, seemingly contradictory or confusing, positions become coherent when regarded within this worldview. This view of interconnectedness, consistently expressed throughout the life of the commission, has wide implications for the interpretation of healing, the asking of amnesty, the rehabilitation of perpetrators, the interdependence of forgiveness and reconciliation in the process of achieving full personhood within a healed society. In the footsteps of Richard Bell, this paper locates this world view within a particular framework formulated as ubuntu by Desmond Tutu, as communitarianism by Kwame Gyekye, as ethnophilosophy by Paulin Hountondji etc. The paper also tries to understand how this interconnected moral self is formed and who the community could or should be that influences this moral self

Last Word: What does “hospitality” really mean?

115 Last year I filled out an endless number of forms on the internet and had my photo taken this way for an American visa, that way for a Schengen one, another way for Britain. I stood in queues to gather freshly stamped documents from my bank, certificates from the revenue service, municipal verification that I own property, a letter confirming my long-term employment, payment slips, certificates of health, insurance, and so on. During face-to-face interviews I felt as if every government agent wanted to tell me: We know you—you sly, diseased, and poverty-stricken person, wanting permission to come and sponge off our social security system, to abuse our precious freedoms with your fundamentalist ideas, and to infect our population with your third-world unworthiness

‘… Oi, oi! … you must go by the right path’: Mofolo’s Chaka revisited via the original text

Thomas Mofolo never defended himself against accusations that his novel Chaka distorts historical facts to express anti-Nguni sentiments under the guise of Christianity. But in a way he foreshadowed the possibility of it, by including as part of his novel a sentence which has become one of his most analysed: “But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his [Chaka’s] life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose”. Mofolo does not elaborate on what he means by “our present purpose”, but simply continues with the story. By focusing on the original Sesotho text, indigenous Zulu customs, African philosophy and the diversions from historical facts, this article explores other possibilities for what could have been Mofolo’s “present purpose”

Die verkleurmannetjie(s) op Shaka: ’n Vergelyking tussen D. J. Opperman en Thomas Mofolo

For the purpose of the D. J. Opperman memorial lecture at Stellenbosch the writer took one of this poet’s most well-known credos who maintained under the influence of Keats that the poet should be ‘colourless’, i.e. without any agenda in order to take on the colour of that which or whom is being imagined. Both Opperman and the Basotho writer Thomas Mofolo imagined Shaka and explore a key moment in both these works where the imagined Shaka is judging his task. It is shown how Opperman’s Shaka is carrying very much the thumbprints of the rising Afrikaner nationalism of the 1940s as well as a notion of the task ofa poet/builder/leader taken directly from European influenced poets such as N. P. van Wyk Louw. In contrast, Mofolo presents Shaka outside the missionary framework of his time and within an indigenous moral structure. In Mofolo’s work ambition changes Shaka into an individual who begins to live in disregard of his community. It is argued that it is important to imagine The Other through getting into their skins, but that imagining The Other as a differently skinned version of oneself, is misleading. To escape the “spurious one-ness of a quasi-liberal era” requires the taking place of unhampered and translated conversations within normalizing circumstances. &nbsp

Re-animating the works of Thomas Mofolo by engaging with the original Sesotho texts

A project around translation was established in 2014 at the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) to engage with literary texts written in indigenous South African languages. The project, entitled "Re-animating and re-imagining African futures: a project for translating African language texts, ethical discourses and critical aesthetics in South Africa", focuses specifically on texts in their original languages in order to introduce new debates around translation, translating from and between indigenous languages, and interpretation and its effect on current new and relevant knowledge creation. Through sustained analysis, older texts (whether translated from the original or not) forged in earlier moments of historical engagement with intruding structures and ideological formations such as colonialism and apartheid, could open up new ideas and incubate an informed debate around current topics such as decolonisation, the Africanisation of the curriculum and institutions, and so forth. Homi Bhabha uses the words of Salman Rushdie to underline the fact that new ways of thinking can begin to take place when the self is decentred. For this, Bhabha (227) foregrounds the interstitial, the in-between, which will “create the conditions through which "newness comes into the world". The place where he sees this happening most acutely is during translation. The moment one has a word in the source text for which one has no clear equivalent in the target text, then one should recognise newness: this is how newness enters the world. Why then the choice of Mofolo's work? Antjie Krog became aware that in the list of the top hundred books written by Africans, a smaller list of twelve exceptional books was compiled. The only text by a Southern African writer on that list was not one by this area's Nobel Prize winners, but Thomas Mofolo's Chaka

Ndabethwa lilitye: Assumption, translation and culture in the testimony of one person before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The second week of the first round of hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission took place in Cape Town. On 2 April 1996 four mothers testified that Security Forces killed their sons during an incident that became known as the Gugulethu Seven. One of them was Mrs Notrose Nobomvu Konile. Of the four mothers she testified last and presented a testimony that seemed largely incoherent with very little detail about her son. Using the original Xhosa testimony the authors try to understand Mrs Konile. This essay focuses exclusively on her description of what the authors refer to as the “rock-incident”. The essay uses the original narrative with its embedded cultural contexts as well as a new translation to trace some of the different stages and places where incomprehension had been created