[Delius is a South African poet, novelist, dramatist, nonfiction writer, and journalist who has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers. In the following excerpt, he offers a negative assessment of Anthem of the Decades.]

Mazisi Kunene's 300-page dithyramb [Anthem of the Decades] is dedicated to all the women of Africa, especially the renowned Zulu women, as well as to a couple of goddesses in the African pantheon. Anthem of the Decades is an enormously expanded version of the folktale which tells how death came to man. God decided that man should be immortal and sent a chameleon to tell him, then changed his mind and sent a salamander hurrying after to tell man death was to be his lot. In Kunene's retelling of it all the powers of heaven and earth, and even those under the earth, become involved in the race between the dilatory chameleon and the speedy salamander. The epic sags more and more under interminable speeches and arguments between gods and goddesses in lines like these:

       Yet if man is destroyed, it will be his destiny alone,
       For man and the Gods do not suffer the same fate.
       Even though it may seem they too have been destroyed,
       It will only be a temporary aberration.

Kunene, now an Associate Professor at the University of California and a leading member of the South African liberation movement, the African National Congress, grew up listening to the insolent upholders of "White Christian Civilization" who claimed that black people were unable to produce a civilization like their own or of any kind. Possibly after nearly thirty years of enforced exile, Kunene still feels the need to explode that racist absurdity, as well as express his proper pride in the cultural and religious concepts of the Zulus, and has been led into errors of literary judgment. I fear this verbose and singularly unconvincing work must do grave disservice to the poet's Zulu version.