SOURCE: "Mazisi Kunene," in Understanding African Poetry: A Study of Ten Poets, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1982, pp. 173-201.

[Goodwin is an Australian critic, editor, and educator who has stated that "[my] ambition is to come upon a critical theory that is novel, useful, and intelligible." In the following essay, he provides a stylistic and thematic overview of Kunene's major works, calling them "thoroughly African."]

By a paradox of contemporary publishing opportunities, Mazisi Kunene, who writes in Zulu and then translates some of his poetry into English, has had much more of his work appear in translation than in the original. Born in Durban in 1930, he began writing as a boy, and by the age of ten or eleven was submitting poems to newspapers and magazines. A small collection of [unpublished] poems in Zulu, Idlozi Elingenantethelelo, won an award in the Bantu Literary Competition in 1956, and poems were published in Ilanga laseNatal and the African Teachers' Journal. But it was not until after he came to England in 1959, initially to study the Zulu literary tradition but interrupting his studies to become an official of the African National Congress, that English versions of his Zulu poems began to appear.

If Dennis Brutus is the most Westernized of all the poets considered in [Understanding African Poetry: A Study of Ten Poets], Mazisi Kunene is the most thoroughly African. His chief influences have been Magolwane, the court-poet of the great Zulu king, Shaka, and Dr B. W. Vilakazi, the twentieth-century poet, scholar, and teacher. The world of discourse of his poems is a Zulu one, with the philosophy, the imagery, and the rhetoric relying heavily on the oral tradition of Zulu poetry from the eighteenth century to the present day. Translation into English inevitably sacrifices a great deal: the sound-pattern (an important feature of Zulu poetry), the flexible construction of one part of speech from another, the repetition and parallelism, the multiple concrete and mythological meanings of words, and the rhythm (though this is perhaps a less important feature of the Zulu poetic tradition than of the English). Kunene's English versions, often representing a rather truncated version of the original, are nevertheless important poems in their own right, just as Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino or Kofi Awoonor's 'I Heard a Bird Cry' are.

The major works so far published by Kunene are two epics which he worked on from the early 1960s. Both have been published only in English versions. The first was Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic (1979). It is a poem of some 17,000 lines dealing with the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka: it is a national epic, based on the life of a man of great political and military vision. Kunene told Alex la Guma in 1966 that he intended through the national theme to express the general experience of mankind, and that general experience I think in turn, must emphasize the oneness and the unity of man'. The other epic, he said,

deals with the creation, the origin of life, the concept of the origin of life held by an indigenous African community. And since this is a discussion, basically, about a philosophy of life (which I think is what any religion is), the social expression of the philosophy of life of a particular community; the epic then deals with this philosophy, the beliefs in the organization of society, the beliefs in the ultimate destinies of man, and the belief in the actual history of the community itself. [In African Writers Talking: A Collection of Interviews, edited by Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse, 1966].

All that was published for a long time was an extract of 218 lines in an English version. It appeared as 'Anthem of Decades' at the end of Kunene's first volume in English, Zulu Poems (1970). When the entire work was published in 1981 as Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic this section appeared, with slight changes, as Book One.

It is often asserted that African poetry, by contrast with European, is spoken not by an individual but by the representative of a community, that its scale of values is community-centred, that it gives symbolic expression to the community, and that it assumes and manifests a continuity of tradition from the past, through the present, to the future. These bold generalizations, when applied to much contemporary poetry, can seem matters of faith rather than of demonstration, but in regard to Kunene's work they are demonstrably true. It is perhaps not unduly fanciful to see in the very titles, Zulu Poems and … A Zulu Epic, a self-effacing suppression of individuality in favour of an assertion of collective identity. As much of his first volume consists of poems concerned with life, mortality, the Ancestors, exile, revolution, and rebirth, 'Anthem of Decades' can provide a solid introduction, for it traverses many of the subjects raised in the shorter poems.

Unlike Gabriel Okara's 'The Revolt of the Gods', this celestial debate occurs before the creation of man and is, indeed, about whether such a creation is desirable. The earth, moon, and stars exist in a dark, silent universe. Into the silence comes Sodume, the spirit of deep-voiced, male thunder, which acts as 'the Intelligence of Heaven' to bring fructification to the earth. He splits open the earth, releasing all the animals that people it. So ferocity and fear are released, as one beast preys on another in 'general carnage'. Fertility, then, must be accompanied by destruction; 'good things must feed the ruthlessness of appetites' and Sodume, the spirit of fertility, is also responsible for destructive earthquakes.

The debate about the creation of man is conducted between Nomkhubulwane, 'the princess of life', the daughter of the Creator, and Somazwi, a god critical of the proposed creative activities. Nomkhubulwane argues that

        'We have fulfilled the other tasks of creation
      But they are not complete without man,
      He who will bind all things of existence.
      A great shepherd who excels with wisdom.'

The more militant Sodume had earlier argued that man would be 'Proud and defiant before all things', so it would seem that man's unification of 'all things of existence' will be by virtue of his superior understanding, self-esteem, and power.

The contrary argument presented by Somazwi begins with a similar assumption, that man will have 'a new power That will supervise all things with knowledge'. He argues that this position intermediate between the beasts and the creative forces will be unsatisfactory. Unlike the beasts, man will not be content with the joys of existence. His mind will range over the past and the future, doubting the very value of existence, knowing too much for his own comfort.

Nomkhubulwane's answer is accompanied by the sun, now mentioned for the first time as being in the sky. She rejects the conservative argument that creation ought to be considered finished. In her view, creation is a continuous process inherent in life: 'creation must always create. Its essence is its change'. Man's superiority will partake of this very nature of creation, for his struggle to attain wisdom will be the source of his power. As Sodume later puts it, this mental effort will represent 'the extension of life'. This participation in the central creative, life-giving quality is, then, not only a source of power, but also a participation in 'the oneness of which he [man] is extension'.

The equation of creativity with unsatisfied mental activity is a bold and exciting one, probably the most radical metaphysical notion to be found in the whole of African poetry. The argument of Okara's 'The Revolt of the Gods' seems petty by comparison.

Many of Kunene's shorter poems seem like chips from the creation epic. They take up some of the same concerns and use the same cosmic imagery. 'From the Ravages of Life We Create', for instance, focuses on the emergence of creation from destruction, the renewing process of life, the interrelationship of grief with joy. Each of the images says almost the same thing, but each defines the concept in some particular way. Suns are 'torn from the cord of the skies', to mingle in shame with fallen leaves, but the cord itself remains and the combination of winter suns and leaves offers a hint of the process of natural decay that feeds the next generation of life. The 'wedding party' image of fecundity is mingled with 'the moon disintegrating', a suggestion of renewal only through decay, whether the decay is in inanimate nature or a woman's monthly cycle. The power of man as it is found in the searching intellectuality that can never rest is again asserted, and the poem ends in a splendidly original image combining the notion of man's power and his limitations, the good and the evil that he is capable of: even a plague of locusts 'with broken wings' can shelter the earth from the intense heat of the sun.

'In Praise of the Earth', 'Wenishet-Jusmere', 'Master of Days', and 'The Night' all deal with one paradoxical aspect or another of the creation or life process: ugliness and beauty, decay and re-creation, time and continuity, grief and hope. They proceed mostly by a procession of cosmic or natural images, related to each other in tenor or meaning but often quite unrelated in vehicle or imagistic device.

'Man's Power Over Things' and 'Triumph of Thought' memorably assert the value of humanity over the value of 'things', including the fearful thoughts man can create. 'Cycle', 'Abundance', 'Isle of Man Christmas 1967', and 'Triumph of Man' concentrate on the endless cycle of death and renewal, 'Triumph of Man' going so far as to say that it is man himself who alone has created the notion of endlessness or eternity. 'The Valley of Rest' speculates on why man cannot possess certainty, and 'Realization' offers part of an answer in that it points to the status of man as only one part of created beings: 'we did not inhabit this earth alone'.

The blanket of the sky, the ribs of the earth, the children of stone that emerge from the ribs, the brutality and indifference of iron, the light of the stars and moon, and natural phenomena such as rain, sunlight, wind, and storms form the recurring imagery of these metaphysical poems. The grandeur of the universe, the wonder of creation, and the central power of man as a restlessly investigative and concept-making being are vividly conveyed. Kofi Awoon-or has expressed considerable sympathy with them and writes well about their indebtedness to Zulu cosmology, though he rather oddly sees an influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on 'Anthem of Decades'. Awoonor's own poetry makes similar use of rhetorical strings of traditional images to approach and define a single concept, though with less intellectual precision than Kunene.

Kunene draws on Zulu oral traditions not only in these poems on epic subjects but also in his elegies, which, as he points out in the 'Introduction' to Zulu Poems, use the traditional device of understatement. Understatement of the grief felt by the poet is achieved by adopting an almost light-hearted sense of grievance against the dead person. The magnitude of death may be scaled down to seem equivalent to the embarrassing absence of the guest of honour from a feast, for which the poet reproves the dead one. 'Elegy for My Friend E. Galo' chides the friend for dying 'without my knowing' while the poet was out collecting firewood, buying expensive cattle, and preparing stories for the celebration. At the end, however, there is a bitterer tone, as the poet turns from the imagery of the feast to that of predatory locusts and 'the discordant symphony of naked stars': what had been made to seem casual absence from a celebratory occasion is now recognized as part of the universal mortality of man and nature. 'An Elegy to the Unknown Man Nicknamed Donda' is addressed not to the dead man but to the poet himself, as the muses on what he should do in his grief. He decides to take the elephant's advice to follow Donda into death, 'the place of the setting sun'. Death is again understated: here it seems to be just an everyday journey where one might meet an uncomprehending traveller. The ending this time recognizes not the universality of death, but its personal quality: one man's grief is another man's idle curiosity. In both these poems, the feeling is personal. In 'Elegy for Msizi', however, the voice is largely a communal one, representing the grief of the Bhele clan. Msizi's fame and achievements are matched by the magnitude of grief felt for him, and the poet ends with a prophecy of the clan's future greatness.

'Elegy for Msizi' has the poet rhetorically addressing the dead man, describing and commenting on the funeral rites, speaking personally, speaking on behalf of the clan, and speaking as a prophet. The multitude of voices provides some resemblance to another traditional form, the pithy, often satirical conversation poem, represented in Kunene's work by poems such as 'For a Friend Who Was Killed in the War', 'Two Wise Men', and 'A Great Generation'. The conversation poem is a form widespread in Africa; it exists, for instance, among the Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, and Ewe in West Africa, and is represented in English in the work of Soyinka, Okigbo, J.P. Clark, and Kofi Awoonor. Often it is used for a somewhat riddling children's poem, but Kunene's use is more solemn. He retains the responsorial form of a cantor and chorus, but uses it for utterances about death, the Zulu nation and its future, and major ethical values. His conversation poems thus resemble less the normal Zulu form than the elevated responsorial passages in some of the praise-songs, such as that of Zwide, king of the Ndwandwe.

Three other categories of Kunene's poems, though not closely related to traditional Zulu forms, draw heavily on the same store of imagery. They are love poems, poems about creativity and the writing of poetry, and political poems. The love poems, 'Presence', 'Restlessness and Experience' and 'Uneasy Love', all have the speaker separated from his beloved. In 'Presence' she appears fleetingly in a dream; in 'Restlessness and Experience' she has provided bitter experiences in the past but remains in the memory; and in 'Uneasy Love' their meeting is a remote symbolic one represented by washing in the same pool. These are romantic poems, creating the feeling of what it is like to be absorbed in hopeless love; there are no direct descriptions of the beloved, though the focus is at least as much on her as on the poet who experiences and expresses the emotion.

The poems about the creative act of composing poetry are also romantic in imagery, though it is more cosmic and less homely than in the love poems. 'The Power of Creativity', 'To the Watcher of the Gates', 'The Sweet Voice', 'To the Reluctant Poetess: Alicia Medina', 'Conquest of Dawn', and 'Dedication to a Poet' present an elevated view of the poet's craft and function in imagery of the skies, the sun and moon, wind and waves, bird flight and song, caves and rivers, flowers and fruit, battle and wayfaring. Discouragement by others and doubts about oneself have to be struggled with and set aside; but in each poem the struggle is successful and the ending is confident. The sense of the poet's tradition, his communality not so much with his people in general as with his fellow-poets who have passed on the task of preserving and nurturing the poetic heritage, is strongly expressed in 'Dedication to a Poet', addressed to Magolwane, the great court-poet of Shaka.

The political poems range in mood through the thirst for vengeance of 'Thought on June 26', the bitter invective of 'The Civilisation of Iron' and 'Europe', the heroic hope for the future of 'The Spectacle of Youth', and the muted sense of the problems of political belief and action in 'Three Worlds' and 'The Political Prisoner'. The more philosophical and elegiac poems offer a mood familiar elsewhere in Kunene's work. The bold rhetoric of the more aggressive poems is unparalleled elsewhere in this volume; its closest analogues are with some of the more bellicose parts of his great epic, Emperor Shaka the Great, which is in part a political poem attesting to national greatness in the past and national liberation in the future.

To compose a national epic demands both historical skills and literary courage of a high order. Kunene's Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic was a long time in gestation, not only in the sense that some of the materials used are over two centuries old but also in so far as Kunene's own composition spanned many years. In the 1966 interview with Alex la Guma already referred to he said that he was writing this work, in Zulu, partly because he considered Shaka 'a great political and military genius' and partly because he hoped, through a national epic, to 'express the general experience of mankind', emphasizing 'the oneness and the unity of man'. This second reason is, in fact, a belief that he attributes to Shaka himself many times in the epic, for he presents Shaka as wishing neighbouring peoples to live in peace (though under a strong unified leadership) and as respecting the customs (though not the acquisitiveness and ill manners) of white traders. A third reason lying behind Kunene's demanding and ambitious work is the respect he has for Shaka's court poet, Magolwane, 'one of the greatest of African poets, indeed I would say one of the greatest world poets'. To Magolwane he ascribes a revolution in Zulu poetry, including the introduction of political and social analysis, penetration of character, philosophical ideas, and abundant imagery (notably of ferocious animals). A great deal of Magolwane's 'epic' or 'poem of excellence' about Shaka (other writers call it a 'praise-poem' or 'praise-song') is in fact incorporated in Kunene's work.

Emperor Shaka the Great concerns the rise of the Zulu empire under Shaka. Its historical scope begins with the period of Jama, Shaka's grandfather, whom he was supposed to resemble, but after a few hundred lines has arrived at Shaka's birth (in 1975 or, according to some historians, 1787). In Book Two, Shaka, growing up in exile, becomes a young man. By Book Four he is engaged in military and political training in the court of King Dingiswayo of the Mthethwas. At the beginning of Book Five he succeeds his father, Senzangakhona, as king of the Zulus (1816) and in the following book is welcomed by the Mthethwas as Dingiswayo's successor (1818). The remainder of the work details the extension of the Zulu empire, the death of Shaka's close friends and relatives, the seeds of dissent and jealousy, and his murder by his half-brothers, Dingane and Mhlangane, and his court councillor, Mbopha, in 1828. The last book, the seventeenth, is followed by a 'Dirge of the Palm Race', a lament for Shaka and the other heroes who have died, an exultation in Shaka's glory, and a declaration that the earth will be made 'free for the Palm Race'.

This ambitious poem, written like most of Kunene's poetry, in Zulu (a version still unpublished) and then, with the excision of some scholarly historical material, translated into English, partakes of many of the commonest qualities of the oral epic, whether found in Greece, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, Mali, or India. It is an exaltation of the history (whether actual or mythical) of a nation, interpreting and commenting on the events; it has, in part, a hieratic, elevated language, suitable for formal enunciation to a national gathering; there are repeated formulaic passages and a variety of praise-names given to the major characters; it presents a courtly society, in which the rôle of poet is honoured and in which the king himself sometimes composes poetry; the hero is of almost superhuman strength, ability, and insight, and plays the major part in consolidating and protecting his people; there is a sense of continuity between the human characters and an unseen world (in this case the Ancestors) which may commune with human characters in dreams or visions; it has single-combat fighting in the midst of large-scale warfare that is crucial to the welfare or survival of the nation; it has roll-calls of heroes, warriors, and nations; before and, more importantly, after successful battles there are celebrations involving dancing, the recital of praise-poems, feasting, and athletic games; there are inset poems from an older oral tradition (including, in this case, the praise-songs, or poems of excellence as Kunene prefers to call them, of the Shakan court poet, Magolwane); and there is a sense of irresistible fate dictating the undeserved downfall of the hero and casting its shadow before events.

Kunene's interpretation of Shaka draws on pre-Shakan literary methods, the revolutionary technique of Magolwane, and later scholarly and literary developments. A pre-Shakan poet would have emphasized Shaka's blackness, tallness, strength, beauty, bravery, and craftiness, as in the praise-poem of Dingiswayo quoted in Book Six, where the king is twice called 'Black one' or in the praise-song of Senzangakhona (a part not quoted by Kunene) where the king is said to be

       He whose body was beautiful even in the great famine:
       Whose face had no fault,
       Whose eyes had no flaw,
       Whose mouth was perfect,
       Whose hands were without defect;
       A chest which had no blemish
       Whose feet were faultless,
       And whose limbs were perfect …

Kunene almost takes this pre-Shakan tradition for granted. He off-handedly says that Shaka 'grew tall in size and reputation' or that he was 'tall and proud and defiant'. His descriptions of Shaka's appearance dwell on his sinuous strength and mobility as a dancer or on his adornments rather than on his body. 'He swayed his body as if he would beat the ground', 'His whole body was uplifted by his movements', or, near the end of his life, 'His whole physique trembled with movement'; even in talking to his men his voice radiates the strength of his personality: 'Then his whole body would light up'. On occasions of celebration or grief he puts on ceremonial dress:

       Shaka caused many eyes to stare as he emerged,
       Adorned for the festival in colours of triumph.
       On his shoulders were epaulettes of the soft otter skin
       And on his shoulders was the long feather of the loury bird
       He carried a large white shield centred with a black spot.
       The poet, inspired by this spectacle, declaimed:
       'The glorious feather that bends over beyond the Nkandla forest,
       Arching to devour the crowds of men!'
       The majesty that was Shaka was embellished with white tails;
       His arms were covered with ivory amulets.
       As he stood facing the noonday sun his body glistened,
       Radiating the secrets of mind and contentment.

For Kunene the body is a reflection of the mind, and is far less interesting in itself than for what it represents. He is, in fact, critical of pre-Shakan poets for their traditional descriptions of physical characteristics. Though he occasionally calls Shaka or other kings 'Black One', on about half the occasions this is because he is quoting traditional poems. He has nothing of the extravagant pre-Shakan glorification of the body, which is represented even in Thomas Mofolo's Chaka: An Historical Romance in the passage:

in this quarter of the city Chaka used to walk naked with only a loincloth on at the request of his sisters, so that they might feast their eyes with gazing at his body, for Chaka was a man of extraordinary beauty. He was taller than any in his tribe, and to add to this he had breadth as well. He was not thin. From his head to his feet he was without blemish, a giant among men.

Even in war the last request of many of his men wounded to death was that they might gaze upon their chief naked for the last time and die in peace, and he used to comply with their request.

Following the practice of Magolwane, Kunene tries to give motivation and character to Shaka and the other chief figures. Yet his extraordinary respect for Shaka prevents him making as convincing a character study as Thomas Mofolo. Mofolo wrote a novel that sees substantial weaknesses of character in Shaka: he is superstitious, impetuous, ruthless, jealous, and brutally cruel. His novel unfolds like a Shakespearian tragedy or history play on Bradley's interpretation, with faults of character (often the defects of virtues) interacting with inauspicious circumstance to bring about destruction. Kunene writes an heroic poem, in which what tragedy there is, for there is more celebration than tragedy, flows from the nature of fate and humankind, not from the hero's personal defects. Shaka is impetuous, irascible, changeable, and superstitious, but much more is made of his intelligence, careful planning and organization, military genius, inspiring leadership, generosity, capacity for friendship and comradeship, hatred of privilege, and concern for justice. Where Mofolo has Shaka murder his mother, Nandi, Kunene has him humour her wishes in her old age, provide her with every possible medicine, even that of the white man, and institute widespread and bitter mourning when she eventually dies. His own tragic downfall comes not as in Mofolo with a breakdown of his admirable qualities and his possession by jealous, vindictive, and cruel monomania, but by the emergence of 'internal enemies', inevitable as kingdoms grow, and emerging inevitably in this instance, in Book Eight, as Shaka is about to achieve the pinnacle of his exploits with the second battle against Zwide. In Shaka's case, they are the internal enemies he has always feared: his kin. The reason he had never acknowledged any children as legitimate, or allowed them to live, was that 'Generations divide', that sons are inevitably dangerous rivals to a powerful father, as Dingiswayo had been to his father. What he overlooks in his fraternal generosity is the danger posed by his brothers and aunt.

Mofolo commented that:

I do not think that anyone's life was ever so involved in mystery as was Chaka's. Dingiswayo's life is obscure and hidden, but when the facts are known they can be easily understood. But with Chaka all is mysterious and incredible right up to this point in the story [1818]. (Chaka)

Mofolo nevertheless felt an obligation to interpret Shaka as best he could. V. W. Vilakazi, the twentieth-century Zulu poet from whose work Kunene derived a good deal, was on the other hand content to leave an ultimate mystery at the heart of Shaka's character. At the end of 'UShaka KaSenzangakhona' (Shaka, Son of Senzangakhona) he wrote:

      Your name, reviled throughout the earth,
      Will live while men can speak and write
      And strive to solve your mystery!—
      Yet who, mighty Shaka, shall fathom your heart?

Kunene, though having undertaken a scholarly investigation of the historical sources, also preferred to leave a large element of mystery in the central character. His historical investigations led him to the belief that Shaka, rather than being illegitimate as he had said in his M.A. dissertation ('an illegitimate son of the playboy chief Senzangakhona', was in fact born in wedlock (Emperor Shaka the Great) as, indeed, Mofolo had believed. But his character he was content to leave an insoluble mystery. His protector and mentor Dingiswayo says 'This boy is a riddle'; the diviner Mqalane calls him 'you who are a mystery, You the diviner above all diviners, the oracle above all oracles'. As his kin and associates die, his natural brooding becomes intensified: 'Death itself seemed to fascinate him'. When the white traders discuss the relationship between kingship and healing medicine, Kunene says

       The Strangers thought Shaka would say something in their support
       But he never commented, letting them talk uninterruptedly.
       His eyes were focused on their foreheads
       As if he saw a shadow that made him uncertain.
       What was in Shaka's mind at that moment? People have often asked.

Kunene has given up part of the fabulist's task and resorted to inscrutability and mystification. The effect might have been to make Shaka supra-human and incredible. In fact, however, the mystification projected to the reader by the author is accompanied by increasing introspection on Shaka's part. It is not revealing introspection its results are not, of course, revealed to the reader, but they seem not to be revealed to Shaka either, and he therefore becomes an object of greater interest. He had often given long thought to a tactical problem (most notably the problem of how to scale the Fortress of the Phephethas, which took 'five days' to solve), but now he seemed often to retreat into himself: 'His mind [was] absorbed in thoughts of things to come'; those who watch him 'claimed he saw the shadows of the dead With whom he shared the thrill of such events'; 'People heard him speak alone as if to commune with the Spirits'; he himself feels that 'I am obsessed with the voices of the dead'; he has a 'visitation' from his dead mother Nandi; he begins to fear that 'It seems whatever I treasure withers suddenly'; 'the terrors that obsessed the king' seem largely generated by the trauma of his mother's death and there is even a spiteful rumour that he killed her; the premonitory 'truthful dreams' to which he has always been subject seem to weigh heavily upon him; and, lastly, 'He sat in a far-distant spot, silent like a figure carved in stone', so awesome that the assassin sent by Mbopha retreats, saying '"He is fearful!'"

The inner life of Shaka remains a mystery to Kunene, though an increasingly interesting one. His interpretation of Shaka's external actions is however clearly delineated. Shaka was a military innovator, commissioning the short stabbing spear and instructing his men in hand-to-hand combat, discarding the customary sandals worn in battle as cumbersome, emphasizing the importance of speed of attack and pursuit, instituting boy-carriers to see to the supply of food and camping necessities, thinking out tactics either by himself or in dialogue with a trusted confidant, imagining the effect of tactics in his mind's eye, and conveying the results he wanted by metaphors such as 'A great fighter imitates the movements of the wind. / A war is a dance' or a battle must be 'Like the approach of each giant wave to the seashore, / Like a succession of angry waves'. He was also a social and political innovator, incorporating defeated states into the Zulu empire with equal privileges for all citizens and uniform laws, denying patronage to the royal family but bestowing it where merit dictated, abolishing initiation and circumcision as detracting from the preparedness of young men for war, and for the same reason forbidding warriors the distraction of marriage and children. A little more tendentiously, Kunene emphasizes Shaka's democratic spirit in his speeches dwelling on the credit and spoils being due to the whole army:

       … It is not I who won against Phungashe
       But the concentrated power of all our heroes;
       And so it shall be in all our wars.
       I am rich with gifts from the king [Dingiswayo], yet these are not mine.
       We shall feast on them and pay tribute to our Forefathers.
       We shall honour the great past heroes of our nation.
       We shall compose poems of excellence to all our fighters.

or

       Brave men of Zululand, my heart is filled with joy.
       I know now I do not rule this land alone
       But with all those whose visions have enriched our land

Again with half an eye on the present, he has Shaka condemn slavery, particularly as practised by the Boers, and oppression, particularly when it can lead to exile on 'the Island of Stones, Known otherwise as the Island of Robin'. Shaka treats the white traders, representatives of 'the Pumpkin Race', with skin the colour of pumpkin porridge, as emissaries of King George, whom he imagines as an equal monarch with similar ideas on national unification. He is puzzled by their violence and acquisitiveness, their love of possessions and land; he is impressed by the power of the gun and cannon but considers the gun too slow in reloading and cannon too cumbersome in transport for them to displace the spear; and he tries to convert the whites 'to the Zulu religion of generous and selfless giving'. He is, in other words, much more intellectual than previous writers had made him; a fuller character, certainly, but not entirely convincing. He is also far less bloodthirsty than in previous accounts, including Mofolo's. Kunene's account represents a considerable softening of manners from those in which he is represented as personally killing his favourite concubine and slitting open her womb to see how a baby lies in it, automatically killing all of his children and their mothers, and murdering Nandi, his own mother. This egomaniac rage, brutality, and madness is absent from Emperor Shaka the Great. When, for instance, it is discovered that Nandi has hidden the child of Shaka's favourite, Mbuzikazi, and is rearing him as a prospective heir, Kunene has the child killed, almost without any assent from Shaka, by Mbopha, the powerful and evil courtier. Nandi, grief-stricken, turns her frustration and bitterness upon him not upon Shaka, saying to her son:

       I fear Mbopha; I fear him as I fear a snake.
       Often I feel he shall bring great tears to our house.
       Even now our talks no longer have meaning
       Since, by his orders, he has killed the very child I loved.

In some ways it is the two principal women, Mkhabayi, the inscrutable, majestic aunt of Shaka, and Nandi, his quarrelsome, bitter, jealous, suspicious mother, who are the most credibly developed characters. It may be that the women characters in most Zulu literature are presented with greater individuality than the men, for they have the opportunity to play a greater range of rôles, not only the military ones of the men (like the warrior Queen Mantantisi of the baTlokwa) but influential and powerful political ones like that of Mkhabayi, whose private rhetoric is very persuasive and whose real feelings and motives are never revealed to Dingane and not always to the immensely more perceptive Shaka. They are plotters, using their sexual attractiveness, as well as their powers of inventiveness and language, to control or conquer men. After Shaka's brothers' plans for assassinating him have failed, Mkhabayi is wily and persuasive enough to subvert one of his concubines into making preparations to kill him. She 'waited and hid her sharpened weapon', but even while engaging in love-play Shaka becomes suspicious, and after sexual intercourse seeks out the weapon with his eyes Perhaps he remembered that Dingiswayo had owed his death in large measure to the treachery of a woman. At any rate, he is ruthless in dealing with such dereliction. The punishment is banishment rather than death, for Kunene's Shaka is, as I have pointed out, much less bloodthirsty than other writers had made him.

Earlier in the epic, towards the end of Book Eight, both Nandi and Mkhabayi give advice to Shaka. Nandi's is querulous, complaining of his treatment of her, warning him of Mbopha, and longing for an end to war and a continuation of the family. Mkhabayi's is nationalistic and warlike, rousing a warm fellow-feeling in Shaka as she puts a plausible gloss over the machinations that she knows him to be surrounded by. The contrast between the two women is dramatic: Nandi has foresight and right on her side, but Mkhabayi has the greater sense of presence and presentation and is able to subvert Shaka's mind. Though there is no question of where his affections lie, he tends to be neglectful of Nandi and her good advice. He is not susceptible to sexual blandishment, but he can be manipulated by the scheming of his aunt, whose good faith he seems never to question. Nandi represents the sentimental and affectionate side of Shaka, which Kunene emphasizes, though without ever losing sight of his essential bellicosity.

The traditional poems of excellence or heroic poems incorporated in the epic represent Kunene's abridgment and rearrangement of these works. As he points out in his Introduction they serve the purpose not only of attributing praise to heroes and other worthies, but also incapsulating the social and ethical wisdom of the people. Thus heroes are praised for their approximation to the noblest tenets of the nation or criticized and satirized for falling short of the best or for exemplifying false values. Kunene places the traditional poems at strategic points of the narrative, typically before and after battles or at times of celebration, mourning, or diplomacy. Their public or social character is thus emphasized and their placement enhances the grandeur of the events. They are also used as rewards or honours for valour in battle, for this is one of the occasions when the king himself acts as poet. In Book Five, for instance, we learn of 'Poems of excellence given to Shaka by Dingiswayo', though in this instance the narrative continues with the court-poet pronouncing a large part of his own poem of excellence to Dingiswayo. It may be that Kunene is suggesting that this whole poem was later transferred to Shaka, in the same way as he inherited part of his father's and grandfather's praises. A clearer example is in Shaka's actions after victory against the Bhaca in Book Fifteen, when he moves among the troops, occasionally 'conferring a title of honour on a hero'. Sometimes they are recited not by a poet but by the hero himself, as Zulu does in Book Ten. Kunene selects these passages with scholarship and with deep appreciation of their dramatic effectiveness. They are normally inserted so unobtrusively that they seem entirely of a piece with Kunene's own composition. It is rare to find such an awkward self-consciousness about their place in the epic as in Book Nine, where Kunene says:

      Listen to the words of the great poet who was there,
      Who saw with his own eyes the celebration of the new era.

Poems of excellence are thus not the private property of the poet. They become part of the naming and identity of a person not only in his or her own eyes but also in the eyes of the whole people. As such they will be recited by court-poets or praise-singers, or by the person they identify without concern for the originating creative poet. Any poet, indeed any person, will be expected to know the existing poems of excellence for the important members of his clan; a competent poet will select from and rearrange this traditional material to bear on a particular occasion, and an inventive poet, such as Magolwane, may not only transform the interpretation and form of the traditional material but also add a great amount of original material to it.

Almost all the poems of excellence quoted in Emperor Shaka the Great can be found in their Zulu originals in such standard works as Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems. Kunene's own translations into English are, however, of far superior quality to those of Malcolm as edited by Cope. Where, for instance, in Magolwane's heroic poem of Shaka, Izibongo has

          Pursuer of a person and he pursues him unceasingly;
        I liked him when he pursued Zwide son of Langa,
        Taking him from where the sun rises
        And sending him to where it sets;
        As for Zwide, he folded his two little shoulders together,
        It was then the elder was startled by the younger.
          Fierce animal in the homes of people;
        Wild animal that was in charge at Dibandlela's.

Kunene translates the Zulu as

        'The chaser of men who chases without stopping—
        How I loved him as he pursued Zwide, the son of Langa,
        Following him from the regions of the rising sun
        And making him seek sanctuary in the land of the setting sun.
        Zwide was the man whose little shoulders he broke in two,
        Like an old man surprised by a youth!
        Fierce one, whom they announce in terror
        As they flee from their homes.'

The Izibongo version seeks to keep close to the Zulu parts of speech and word order and to represent the very common characteristic of Zulu poetry of repeating the stem of a word but as a different part of speech. Kunene, while preserving these qualities as far as possible, is prepared to sacrifice them at times in the interests of making sense or achieving a more rolling oratorical rhythm. Where the Izibongo versions sometimes read like word-for-word cribs in which the meaning has to be elucidated by a footnote, Kunene's versions show the selective freedom and judgment exercised by someone thoroughly familiar with both languages, having a scholarly and imaginative insight into meaning and a poet's way with words.

The ritualistic placement of these excerpts is paralleled by the occasional use of original set passages, common in most long epic poems throughout the world, at such times as battle or the natural occurrences of the day, like morning or evening. When Shaka, newly appointed to the kingship of the Zulu, is about to wreak vengeance on those of his mother's Langa people who had humiliated him as a youth, Kunene writes:

        The great night swallowed the shadows of the regiments;
        Only the rhythms of their footfalls echoed in the river.
        Sometimes they walked on the anthills, leaving their imprints and broken ants,
        They climbed the little hill, approaching abasemaLangeni,
        And there began to split, forming their strategic movements.
 
        Shaka sat waiting until he heard the last cock crowing.
        He raised his head and saw the large villages of the
        abasemaLangeni clan.
        The sun spread its light from the night into the earth.
        A crimson ribbon hung all around the horizon.
 
        The eagle, disturbed from its night of peace,
        Hovered high over the neighbouring mountains
        As though to spy out those who should fill the earth.
        The old dog flopped its ears near the cattle-fold,
        Casting its eyes and peering at the rising shadows.
        The Zulu army rose with the morning star.
        It was as though they awaited the butterflies of dawn,
        To see them fly in all directions and colours.
        The glimmering spears caught the light of the sun!
        Young men leaped like flashes of lightning from fence to fence.
        The sons of Sokhulu skirted their way to the dark side of the village.
        There they combined with the forces of Gebhuza-of-the-sideboards.

Several elements from the equipment of the traditional Zulu poet are incorporated here: the anthills, the eagle, the butterflies, and the glinting spears, for instance. But Kunene has woven them seamlessly into a new fabric that emphasizes cosmic grandeur, repose, and tense activity about to be unleashed. The elevation of the narrative achieved by romantic suggestiveness is of the same order as that achieved at similar moments by the incorporation of traditional poems of excellence. It is a device used rarely and unrepetitively. When, for instance, in Book Thirteen Kunene unfolds another dawn scene, the immediate purpose and the effects used are entirely different: on this occasion he wants to contrast the idyllic early morning scene of Shaka bathing in a rocky pool with the destructiveness about to be unleashed among the Zulus by white infiltration and weaponry.

Emperor Shaka the Great has the unblinking, monumental quality of inevitability possessed by many great world epics. Its story cannot surprise us, for it is a known one, reassembled and interpreted many times before Kunene. Even if the events were unknown to the reader, Kunene takes care to remove any element of surprise through the announcement of future events, the clarification of Shaka's motivating policies, and the use of premonitory dreams and visions. Much of the action is foretold, though in an oracular fashion, at the beginning of the epic, when a diviner comes to the court of Jama, Shaka's grandfather, and pronounces a long prophecy. Shaka himself or old men in his retinue are visited by prophetic dreams that foretell his future greatness, warn him of danger, warn him of his mother's death, advise him of his future among the Ancestors, or give advice for necessary action. There is thus an inevitability, an inescapable fatefulness, almost an impersonality or inscrutability about the whole work that makes causation and motivation virtually superfluous. If, however, the action cannot startle us, the author's presentation of it can delight us. This is, I believe, a great epic or at least one verging on greatness. Its language and tone are stately yet unaffected, decorous yet unassuming, imaginative yet unassertive. This is the language of the tribe, composed for the tribe by creativity of a high order. Its translation into English enables a wide readership both to appreciate the history and the culture of the Zulus and to speculate on the universally applicable human virtues.

The second of Kunene's epics to be published [Anthem of the Decades] addresses itself to an even greater subject. It is a cosmological epic concerning itself with the reasons for the creation of mankind; his place in the universe; the nature of creation and creativity; the apparent contradictions of life, death, and eternity; and human social organization. It is a philosophical or theological epic, not a military one, being made up to a large extent by councils of the gods debating the nature and future of mankind. The Zulu myth of the origin of death as a change of mind by the Creator God, who sent the speedy salamander as his messenger of death to overtake the earlier messenger of eternal life, the dilatory chameleon, is expanded into a symbolic contrariety between the cosmic and the pragmatic sides of man. This symbolic tension, which is ultimately brought into balance, lasts from Book Five to the last book, Fifteen.

Kunene conducts Anthem of the Decades with a severely attenuated cast of characters. Though heaven, the earth, and the abode of the Ancestors, the three main scenes of the action, are heavily populated, very few personages come to the foreground. In heaven, the discussion is left to Sodume, who is the Intelligence of Heaven, the voice of male thunder, and the chief advocate of man's creation and preservation; his wife Nodume, the voice of female thunder; Somazwi, a god of some deviousness, sarcasm, and vindictiveness, who opposes the creation of man as misguided and self-indulgent and for a time seeks to destroy him; his wife, Nokufa, the Hunchbacked One, who becomes a spirit of implacably destructive urges as a result of her husband's sin; and Nomkhubulwane, the Princess of Heaven, the chief agent of fructification on the earth, or, as Kunene more abstractly describes her, 'the goddess of change and ultimate balance'. None of these gods possess full knowledge of the truth or complete understanding of goodness. They do indeed argue for a great deal of the epic about what policies are true and good:

        For even the gods do not know all the truths
        Nor do they possess the power to know absolutely what is good.
        Thus their efforts are not without blunders.

Nomkhubulwane, troubled by the disputes among the gods, seeks 'a symbol that shall reveal the truth' from her father, the Creator, Mvelinqangi. He, however, refuses the request, saying:

        Such knowledge would negate life itself.
        Creation must grow from ever newly fathomed truths.
        If you possess such omniscience your thinking would cease.
        Indeed, should someone discover you possessed such powers
        Then they themselves would stop creating and thinking.
        For whoever finds ready-made solutions loses
        It is better for all ceaselessly to search for the truth.
        In this way life goes on forever and ever.

Mvelinqangi himself thus makes few appearances among the councils of the gods. He is a kind of rarely used final arbiter, who expects that the powers of creation he has given to the gods will be used in accordance with their collective wisdom. Kunene tells us that:

        Mvelinqangi did not utter many words
        Since all truth and beauty and balance is in him.

One other god, Mthobi, has a major rôle. He is the great poet of heaven who devises the shapes of the human body and through his frequent recitals acts as a chorus or commentary on the action.

Between the gods and the land of the Ancestors is the Second World, containing the young man of the sun, that is, the powerful but somewhat timid force of the sun, and the Sun-Mother, who is full of plenitude and kindness but is blind. In Book Nine, Nsondo, the first Ancestor, comes to her and having, despite the machinations of Somazwi, fulfilled the Sun-Mother's desire for a herd of white heifers, enters into an alliance with the sun, who promises fruitfulness to the earth and an assurance of man's ever-renewing quality.

Nsondo is one of the few men to be named. The other major speaker on the earth is Mbili, a prophet, whose advice is frequently sought. The other earthly creatures with a major rôle are the chameleon and the salamander. In his Introduction Kunene includes among the concepts that they signify a distinction that in the Introduction to his later volume of shorter poems, The Ancestors, he calls the social or philosophic intellect (the chameleon) and the 'precision' intellect (the salamander). This is, however, not a strongly marked aspect of his presentation of the two creatures, though it is clear that they represent two fairly extreme kinds of human thinking and behaviour, in the same way as the 'dogs of heaven', the children of Somazwi, represent human fears and viciousness. There is also a creature who balances the qualities of chameleon and salamander, as man himself ultimately comes to do. This is the sacred snake, the Nyandezulu, who prefers the company of man to that of his own kind and is thus regarded as an agent of divination and prophecy. He encounters the chameleon searching for mankind, and at first considers that 'This creature is seized by madness', but later urges him to fulfil his mission at once.

For a poem of some 12,000 lines (longer, for instance, than Paradise Lost), this is quite a small dramatis personae. As with Emperor Shaka the Great, two women stand out as perhaps the strongest characters. One is the ugly hunchback, Nokufa, who appears in the councils with her face covered. She is visited with the punishment meted out by the gods to her husband, Somazwi. He had sinned by releasing, against the collective intention of the gods, the charm of life among mankind in a terrifying form. Somazwi, the most rational and logical of the gods, one who is not swayed by emotional attachment or grand dreams but has a strong sense of consistent policy and justice, is punished by having his wife willed by the gods to unleash a 'century of destruction', blind, undeserved vindictiveness against man. He is driven to grief and fear for man and, as a fond husband, is hurt by his wife's mindless, unforgiving fury. It is the force of emotion behind that fury, however, that makes Nokufa, unsuccessful though she ultimately is, a memorable character. She delays the chameleon and speeds on the salamander, she argues vehemently for man's destruction in the councils of the gods, she berates her husband for his pusillanimity and ineffectiveness, and she would have been successful in defeating the young man of the sun but for the intervention of the Ancestors. She is loved by no one in her indomitable rage; even her children desert her when she fails; and she has been an outsider and an object of fear or scorn rather than understanding from the beginning. It is perhaps not perverse to have admiration for her as much as for the superficially more attractive Sodume and Somazwi, who inevitably engage attention and admiration in their persuasive speeches to the gods and who are in the end reconciled to each other in public. It is a Zulu characteristic to express admiration for the qualities of an adversary (Somazwi does so in regard to both man and Sodume, for instance), and perhaps the reader may legitimately do so for Nokufa.

The second powerful woman character is Nomkhubulwane, daughter of the Creator. At first she seems almost as remote as her father, and 'it is known that Nomkhubulwane is rarely seen'. Later, however, she loses this remoteness and regal aura of unapproachability and becomes more like the other powerful gods, though her interventions in their debates are always treated with great respect. She combines justice in advocating the punishment of Sodume and Nodume, her closest friends, with pity in turning away and weeping as she does so. She prevails in her faith in mankind even when Sodume, mankind's most vehement advocate, has doubts. She believes that the gods are 'weaker than man' because of man's intellect and his indomitable ability to continue with life despite ignorance of his destiny. In Book Thirteen she visits the Ancestors, first joining them in an exercise to uproot any preoccupation with the self-image (a fault she herself admits to) and later joining in feasting and dancing. Among the gods, she is often perplexed, but always honest; and her interventions in debates are wise and tolerant.

Anthem of the Decades is divided into three parts, each of five books. 'Age of the Gods', set mainly in heaven, covers the creation of man and a large part of the debate about whether he should be destroyed or given additional powers. Part II, 'Age of Fantasy', largely concerns the journeys of the chameleon and the salamander; it ends with war between the two races of mankind symbolized by these creatures and the vision of a future generation to unite all races and factions. Part III, 'Age of the Ancestors', concerns life among the Ancestors, the final debates in heaven about the future of man, the final attempt by Nokufa to destroy him, and a final hymn of praise to the Creator, creation, the gods, and the Ancestors. From Book Nine to Book Fourteen is perhaps the dullest part of the epic. Books Nine and Ten, though full of interesting material, are vitiated by a loss of narrative clarity. It is as if Kunene finds difficulty changing from the philosophical to the narrative mode, and so in the end the mythological exposition suffers. Books Eleven and Twelve have the Ancestors relating their life on earth to each other. Although the question of enslavement is raised in Book Eleven, these stories are not of great interest or significance: they read at times like reminiscent chat. In Books Thirteen and Fourteen the mythological significance is conveyed largely in terms of the chameleon and, as I shall argue later, both chameleon and salamander change too much and too unpredictably to be effective symbols.

In some ways, Kunene is most successful when he presents his ideas in the form of doctrine or adage rather than as symbol or myth. Certain ideas provide a philosophical substratum to the action and are illustrated by it. The most important cosmological idea is probably the continuing nature of creation, including the creation of thought. The gods' task is never finished; there are always new worlds (in the Third World, as Kunene terms it, that is, outer space) to be created. For gods and man, thought is a form of creativity, the loss of which results in stultification, inertia, and drabness. In the process of creativity there will be disagreement and conflict, but the aim is to secure harmony and balance between contrary forces and between the equally important realms of physical being and the unseen or spiritual forces that affect it. 'We are ordered to make all things harmonious in life' are the 'sacred words' of Nomkhubulwane, and Sodume later acknowledges that:

        'True wisdom is only of a woman,
        She alone holds the balance between the two opposites
        She nourishes the forces that bind day and night together.'

But other gods too seek balance. One of the 'followers of Somazwi' (probably Somazwi himself is meant) alleges that his policy strives to achieve 'a delicate balance between his [man's] earthly life and ours'.

Balance implies a holding of entities in harmony, not an assimilation of them into a new synthetic entity. This is apparent in what the narrator says about the immanent and the transcendental scales of time:

       There are two cycles of time, each fitting into the other:
       One spins from the inner centre with people and the earth,
       Creating day and night, summer and winter, life and death.
       Another follows a wide orbit, forming an eternity.
       If the two cycles should meet,
       The great death would overtake all things.
       That is why the chameleon must move at its own pace,
       Following its cycles undeterred by success or failure.
       Only man suffers, only his life is drawn into the inner circle.

In his Introduction, Kunene says that in the Zulu cosmos truth is relative, by which he means primarily that ethical and social standards can only be understood in the context of a community and that life is not arranged in a hierarchy of being with each sphere superior to all those below it. On the contrary, each sphere of life has its own peculiar excellences and standards. One exemplification of this is that man is the supreme being on the earth; the gods know little about the life of humanity—they do not 'possess the wisdom of the earth'—and though they seek to manipulate it they have to work through intermediaries. Another exemplification is that no god (except the Creator) is always wise or good. The gods make errors in exercising their creative powers and they act towards man for a variety of motives, some high-minded, some selfish. There is at times truth in Somazwi's argument that 'The creation of man is for the aggrandizement of the gods'.

Kunene does, however, consistently support a set of moral standards that seem to apply equally to gods, man, and the Ancestors. These standards have as one central principle the primacy of thought to all life. Thought, in its restless, exploratory nature, is seen as akin to creativity. It is praised in both gods and men. The Ancestors, who enjoy a greater measure of rest, are nevertheless not freed from the necessity and obligation to think: they too have their councils. But thought must not be impetuous; even Nomkhubulwane can be chided by the Creator for this failing:

       'Foolishness rushes at all things
       Claiming what is, and what is not of creation
       But creation is the substance of all things,
       To wait for things to unfold is wisdom.
       You have erred in letting your heart follow the winds.
       Learn then from this lesson:
       Do not rush to make judgement on things beautiful,
       Observe creation and behold its multiple truths.'

Thought must also be collective rather than vagrantly individualistic. Creativity such as Mthobi's is individual, but its products have to be approved by communal discussion. One of the aspects of Somazwi's sin is that he 'dared act outside the assembly' in a way that negated 'the work of collective achievement' and violated the collective 'intentions of the gods'. Much later Nomkhubulwane, in explaining to the Ancestors the need to take action to protect the sun and thus save the race of man, says that:

         your vows must be made in concert,
       For whoever invokes his own soul alone fails.
       Your promises must be made in the name of all humankind.

The concomitant of this attitude is to condemn individual vanity, 'self-image', fears, whims, and fantasies. The gods are condemned for exercising individual 'whims' in creation; the chameleon comes in Book Ten to symbolize man's fears, which are full of dangerous 'whims'; fantasies are said to 'open no new provinces'; and when the chameleon indulges in self-pity and self-adulation the narrator says:

       Thus he brooded over his fate
       Building fantasies of welcoming crowds

Such idle speculation about the future is uncreative; it elevates the individual above his society and leads to moral and psychological decay. The search for an individual identity is, then, often condemned as self-indulgent and harmful.

Selfishness is another frequently condemned evil. The hateful race of gorillas and baboons, the Thusi, were once men who violated the code of sharing and so were thrust out of the human community to sink into degradation. Generosity, on the contrary, is praised. It is one of Somazwi's admirable traits, for instance, that he praises Sodume and man, with both of whom he is intellectually at odds; it is to Nsondo's credit that he provides a valuable gift to the Sun-Mother.

Submission to collective decisions does not, however, imply lack of individual initiative and responsibility. That would, indeed, be foreign to the creative nature of thought. The Creator expects the gods to work out their own problems; the gods and the Ancestors expect man to exercise resourcefulness, courage, and self-help before he deserves any help. Man is praised for combating the dogs of heaven and returning with the fire of heaven; the gods are, indeed, in some awe of man's limitless ambition, courage, and adventurousness. From such initiative and activity, associated with the pursuit of truth, comes joy. As Sodume says to the council of the gods:

       For if this creature was created without its power
       And spent its time mourning its existence,
       Then it would have failed, as would also its creator.

..…

       Woe to the man who grows up dependent on the gods.

The same beliefs are reiterated by the Sun-Mother, when she says at the end of Book Eleven:

       … There is a joy that fills the mind with contentment,
       But it must not wither the will.
       People must not die from happiness.
       They must fertilize their lives through their own effort.

It is not only characters in the epic who unburden themselves of such general statements. By contrast with the self-effacing posture of the narrator in Emperor Shaka the Great, the narrator here confidently offers aphorisms and comments about the nature of human personality and society. Many of them are about the nature of power and about behaviour in public gatherings. He says, for instance,

       For in truth such is the curse of the powerful:
       Secretly they are haunted by fears of their own little crimes.

When the council is judging the case of Sodume and Somazwi, he says:

       Someone who was always eager to speak stood up
       But before speaking he made his usual flamboyant gestures
       Preferring ostentation to depth of thought.

From such discussions the author sometimes almost despairs of a sensible outcome:

       It was as if nothing good would ever come from the gods.
       No one seemed to pursue truth beyond their own boundaries.

And he is sceptical about any great wisdom coming from unguided crowds:

       But crowds do not initiate a new era
       They often follow whoever promises escape from misery.

On the other hand, he attributes to wise leaders effective rhetorical attitudes in such comments as

       For it is not uncommon among the wise
       Constantly to assume the posture of uncertainty.

Similar remarks are scattered through the epic. The narrator adopts the rôle of ethical teacher, a person with at least as much insight at any time as the current speaker, and often a good deal more.

The conduct of the argument through myth, as distinct from its conduct through direct statement, is sometimes a little less secure. In Books Two to Five, for instance, the position of Somazwi is either that man should be destroyed and a new start made on a creature who would fulfil the ideals of the gods or else, his later position, that existing man should have his power raised to appropriate levels, he should be given a greater or higher mind. This does not happen, for the gods apparently accept Sodume's counter-argument that if man were perfected

                     his power would wither.
       He would move puppet-like, awaiting only our commands.
       Such a being would be no more than a slave to the gods,
       Like a child solely dependent on its mother's cupped hands.

Yet why this should be the result is never explained. The gods would perhaps then be able to communicate directly with mankind, but it seems unlikely that man would be impressed by their divisions, whims, fantasies, and imperfect grasp of truth into making himself their slave. On the contrary, he might come to think himself superior to them.

This slight flaw in the myth would be easily remediable. A somewhat more puzzling one, however, is the ambivalent and variable nature and interpretation of the salamander and chameleon races of mankind. Although Part II ends with a vision of the proud union of chameleon and salamander characteristics in mankind, Sodume subsequently changes his support from the salamanders to the chameleons (on the ground that they alone possess 'the true love of life' and that the salamanders have been perverted to destructiveness by Nokufa) and Nomkhubulwane secures the permission of the gods to multiply the chameleon people to 'fill the earth'.

One of the problems is that Kunene has not always incorporated in the text the intentions notified in the prose synopses. In the synopsis to Book Nine, for instance, he announces that 'Man also discovers that the salamander has bred many human-like children, rather half-salamander, half-human. They claim descent from the gods'. Yet this activity is not to be found described in the poetic text. The same thing happens when in the synopsis of Book Three he says that the 'huge estate' of Nomkhubulwane on which Sodume's messengers trespass 'should not have been the sole possession of the princess in the first place. She later acknowledges this and agrees to forgive the crime'. The poetic text fails to cover this sequence of events.

These are slight flaws that hardly affect the reader's enjoyment. They come to notice only because for the most part the epic is so clearly and unaffectedly expressed. Milton's elevated and convoluted style is very far from Kunene's limpidity. His subject invites comparison with that of Paradise Lost, but it is only occasionally in the debates in heaven or in the approach of Somazwi's cohorts to the council that any comparison in detail can be sustained. Kunene's lightly rainbowed and cobwebbed universe is far from Milton's physically over-stuffed one, and more credible as a result. His sense of joy and celebration, expressed in frequent anthems, such as 'Life shall not cease with each generation of man' or the more elaborate anthems of the last Book, is the equal of Milton's and, some readers might think, theologically sounder or more plausible. Certainly he does not suffer Milton's disability of needing to characterize and praise a Creator who is a paragon of virtue and wisdom as well as a warrior-king. If the punishment of Sodume's messengers for stealing fruit in Book Three—they are condemned to centuries of hunger—seems somewhat Dantesque or if the heavenly poet Mthobi speaking through the mouth of the ram at the council of animals in Book Five ('we have seen all, felt all, suffered all') seems reminiscent to T. S. Eliot, such references outside the world of Zulu belief and tradition are slight and rare. By writing in Zulu and then translating, Kunene has, as with Emperor Shaka the Great, produced an epic that is thoroughly uniform, self-contained, and self-validating. If it seems a somewhat lesser achievement than Emperor Shaka the Great that is partly because it is more philosophical (and it is notoriously difficult to make poetry out of reasoning), partly because Kunene has had to weave together more separate pieces of traditional material and invent for them a coherent framework. With the Shaka material more of it was already available.

Kunene's shorter poems of the 1970s, many of them collected in his The Ancestors & the Sacred Mountain (1982), concentrate on three main subjects. One large group is concerned with the liberation by bloodshed of South Africa, another looks forward millennially to the time after liberation (and sometimes looks beyond South Africa to the world and, indeed, the universe), and a third concerns the ecstatic nature of poetry. In these poems and in the smaller groupings (such as the poems about individuals, the laments, the poems on motherhood, and the personal poems) the sense of the Ancestors, observing and encouraging, is always present. In addition, some poems are directly about the Ancestors or Forefathers. They represent for Kunene the whole company of those 'who have made their contribution to human welfare and progress', as he says in the Introduction to The Ancestors. It is to them and not to inventors of material improvements that the Zulus look for standards, guidance, and inspiration in continuing social life, and they treat them as a collective repository of wisdom rather than as a group of individual heroes.

In 'A Heritage of Liberation' the Ancestors are said to have given to the present oppressed generation 'in all these thin seasons … the visions of life'. They will also guard and preserve for use by 'generations hereafter' the weapons of liberation forged by those now about to depart from this life. The contemporary generation has been hovered over menacingly by 'the eagle' and 'the vultures'; it will need to pursue them, to 'follow the trail of the killer-bird', so that the 'dream of the festival' may be fulfilled in 'the rays of the morning'. The imagery here is taken up again many times in these determined poems of liberation. The government and its agents are referred to in symbols, often of predatory birds, and those symbols are then applied, though with a transformed freshness and glory, to the liberators who have had to learn from the techniques of the oppressors. So, in 'The Rise of the Angry Generation', it is the young generation, 'the children of iron' representing 'the abiding anger of the Ancestral Forefathers', who are spoken of as a 'great eagle' and a 'mysterious young bird' with 'merciless talons'. They will unleash retribution, symbolized by the 'volcanic mountains' of this poem, the devouring sword of 'Sword Eulogising Itself After a Massacre', the 'fearful light' of 'The Master and the Victim', or the 'chameleon's way' of 'Mercy'.

For the most part, Kunene is buoyantly confident of success against the oppressors. In 'The Master and the Victim' he announces that:

       The day of reckoning is within us
       The child has chosen to avenge his parent
       The walls explode ceaselessly into the distant horizon!

In 'To a South African Policeman' he says 'They have no future'. Even when he does not overtly declare such a belief, he expresses an inner cumulation of the sense of wrong that implicitly must triumph. In the lament, 'Congregation of the Story-tellers at a Funeral of Soweto Children', he says that 'Whatever we failed to say is stored secretly in our minds' and 'We have received the power to command'. Very occasionally, however, he almost gives way to despair. In 'Bitter Thought in Exile' he suggests that confidence of early success is tantamount to 'oceans of fantasy' (always a pejorative word in his vocabulary), that the dream has 'opened' to reveal 'a long winding path'. Symbols of success such as the sun and the eagle have vanished, and even his song is under threat. But the poem ends with resolution as he recalls those who have died for the cause.

The second large group of poems looks forward to the millennium beyond the act of liberation. In them the recurring images are of celebration, circles, life, light, dawn, ecstasy, peace, water, fruitfulness, flowers, and bird-song. 'First Day After the War' has the setting of a wedding and a first-fruits festival; both it and 'Brave People' have circles of fecundity; 'Changes' and 'Awakening' repeat many of the symbols common to this group; 'Return of Peace' ends with an anthem. 'Return of the Golden Age' adds laughter to the common stock of images, and in some other poems, such as 'Dream of Planets' and 'Encounter with the Ancestors', Kunene uses it as an indication of a good society. 'Dream of Planets' and 'World Wisdom' look beyond Africa to a common peaceful humanity either in the rest of the world or beyond in other worlds as well. 'Anthem of Peacefulness' emphasizes the communion between humanity and nature: the shepherd-boy sings the song of the wind, the poet greets the afternoon, and 'the quiet earth' embraces us. The post-war period will be characterized by love and forgiveness, for 'great loves enrich the earth' ('Nourishments of Love'), 'those who are wise are generous' ('Brave People'), and

       May we forgive those who have caused us pain;
       For today only.
       So that we may begin a new era
       Riding high on the shoulders of the hill.
                                       ('Today's Wish')

Again in nearly all these poems there is a sense of the Ancestors presiding over the succession of generations and rejoicing in the new era of freedom.

Rejoicing of an ecstatic kind is the mood of a large group of poems concerned with a poet's celebration of freedom. 'Son of the Beautiful Ones—the Dancer' presents the representative of contemporary society, faithful to the heritage of the Forefathers, the Beautiful Ones, uniting in sexual ecstasy with Nomkhubulwane, goddess of rain and harvest, the Princess of Heaven of Anthem of the Decades. In 'Ecstasy of a Song', 'To Nomazwi—A Reluctant Poetess', and 'The Unhappy Composer', the singer is also able to assume and even command the characteristics of nature. 'Journey to the Sacred Mountains' presents the singer as led by natural forces to the land of the Ancestors or Holy Ones, where he listens to 'the great epics … of the ancient poets', 'A Vision of Zosukuma' similarly has the present generation learning from 'the poem that is old'. But the most astonishing power of song is not that it can seize the poet and give him control of the forces of nature or bring him into communion with the Ancestors, but that it can enable him to give a second birth to Shaka. In 'The Second Birth of the Great Shaka of the Zulus' the poet undergoes fortifying rites (using the circle, water, fire, and herbs) and 'Then whirlwinds began to move'. He is however able to conquer them and ride them 'like a horse', so that Shaka in lightning and rainbow is reborn to symbolize the new battle:

       I watch him walking on his path
       To seize the fierce rays of the sun,
       To fight until we break open the night

In most of these poems, and in others such as 'Uncontrollable Feeling of Ecstasy', the poet is drawn towards song, ecstasy, or magic initially by understanding the beauty and force of nature. In two poems, however, 'My Swazi Boy or Song of the Frog' and 'To a Navaho Boy Playing a Flute', he is first captivated by the physical beauty of a boy and through that recognition is released into ecstatic union with the forces of nature, song, and eternity. In a number of other poems too he eulogizes particular people, though in the other instances the people are named and do not submerge their personality in their symbolic significance. 'To Nomazwi—A Reluctant Poetess' has already been mentioned. 'Tribute to Mshongweni' honours the greatest of the nineteenth-century Zulu poets after Magolwane; 'Myeza and His Musical Instrument' a great player of the makhweyana or musical bow; 'To Tu Fu, Beethoven, Va Dong, Magolwane and All the Great Poets of Humankind' poet-musicians of Africa, Europe, and the Far East. Other poems are praises of political heroes ('Phakeni's Farewell'), kinsmen ('To My Elder Kinsman (Polycarp Dlamini)'), or friends ('A Salute to My Friend Zo'), or else are imprecations like 'Nozizwe'. With these personal poems can be grouped a number of poems with an autobiographical quality such as 'The Second Birth of the Great Shaka of the Zulus' with its muted reference to his own epic; '252 or at the End of a Volume', which also refers to his own composition of epics; '"Advice" to a Young Poet', a sardonic account of the acceptance and power of the poet in society; 'The Return of Inspiration' on the overmastering influence on Kunene of Magolwane; and 'On Leaving Norway, From a Mission, Without a Penny', concerning his political activities on behalf of South African black nationhood.

If some of the poems about individuals partake to some extent of the nature of Zulu praise-songs or poems of excellence, some of the more sombre poems partake of the nature of laments. 'To a Friend Whose Family was Killed or Ngenimpi (A Late Recruit)' swallows up sorrow in rejoicing that Ngenimpi has become a political activist and is thus worthy of the Ancestors. 'Death of the Miners or The Widows of the Earth' poignantly contrasts the hollow pomp of an official ceremony with the numbing information, simultaneously available, of the death of the miners from the town. 'His Night of Sadness' is a very cold, ambiguous lament, whereas 'After the Death of Mdabuli, Son of Mhawu' draws on the rich store of natural, cyclical, and cosmic imagery to relate the hero to the history of the clan, the life of the Ancestors, and the continuity of the generations.

Poems directly about the Ancestors such as 'Encounter With the Ancestors', 'Playing With My Kinsman', 'My Forefathers', and 'In Praise of the Ancestors' are conducted in terms of the Zulu myth of creation, symbols of continuity such as the circle, and images of nature and eternity. The Ancestors both listen to earthly song and unite their voices with it; they lead the poet to contemplate the certainty of victory, the oneness of humankind, and the immensity of the cosmos. It is because of their ability to extend the visions of humanity that 'the deep eye of the universe is in our chest', as 'In Praise of the Ancestors' puts it.

For Kunene, then, the social and cultural history of the Zulus as incorporated in the cult of the Ancestors, can provide guidance, inspiration, and vision on every moral and political matter. Personal grief, insecurity, and even rage are swallowed up in a communal experience capable of producing the most intense ecstasy. The poet is possessed by a sexual and religious frenzy that authenticates and gives certitude to his message. Yet unlike the possession of, say, the Romantic poets, this is possession of a spokesman who has a social duty to announce truth to the clan. In this respect, it is like the traditional possession of the singer of an epic who ascribes the glory of the tale of the tribe to divine inspiration.

These poems of the 1970s are much more sharply focused than the earlier ones on the contemporary political situation in South Africa. But through they are more militant, they are not more strident, as Dennis Brutus's or Lenrie Peters's political poems became. Kunene has the confidence of the poet who speaks on behalf of the clan rather than as an individual agonized voice. His work thus stands in sharp contrast to the sense of romantic isolation and alienation expressed by most African poets writing in English.

More importantly, however, he has written the two most ambitious poems to come out of modern Africa. With modest confidence in the face of much discouragement, he has created from his Zulu inheritance two epics (and others that have not been translated or published yet) that are both thoroughly African and at the same time of international significance. His achievement may mark the end of the period when African poetry in English turned to Britain and America for its style and allusions. It may even mark the beginning of a reverse process, for his work is more substantial and inspired than that of other poets currently writing in English.