SOURCE: "Contemporary Samples of English-Speaking African Poetry," in The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975, pp. 193-225.

[Awoonor is a Ghanaian poet, editor, critic, novelist, and educator who has stated that his work "takes off from the world of all our aboriginal instincts." In the following excerpt, he discusses Kunene's incorporation of Zulu oral traditions in Zulu Poems.]

Modern poetry from Africa has [focused] … on the tension between the traditional and the modern world. Its themes have ranged from Negritude's race proclamations to the hymnal verse inspired by the patriotic sentiments raised by the anticolonial struggle of the postwar years. Most of the poets took their direction from external sources;… Negritude borrowed heavily from French symbolism and surrealism, while the English-speaking poets of the immediate postwar generation borrowed from Victorian verse and Methodist hymnology. The later poetry in English-speaking Africa derives from Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the modern imagists, who make up the English and American literature syllabuses of the new African universities.

A few of the poets, however, owe their growth in style and language very largely to the genius of traditional oral poetry. One of these is the Zulu poet Mazisi Kunene, who has worked both in his native Zulu and in English. He insists upon a communal and oral quality in his work, which he sees as flowing directly from the Zulu oral poetic tradition. The Zulu poetry perfected during the reign of Shaka in the first half of the nineteenth century is an example of the Bantu oral traditions that have been largely preserved in spite of the brutal assault made upon the Bantu societies of southern Africa by white supremacist regimes. Special institutions such as competitions in the art of storytelling enabled the poets to continue their work within the fold of the community. Mission schools with their Christian dogma failed in their attempts to discredit the calling and art of poets as part of a disgustingly barbaric age when the people knew not the "true" God.

In the introduction to his collected poems, [Zulu Poems], first written in Zulu and later translated by him into English, Kunene writes: "These are not English poems, but poems directly evolved from a Zulu literary tradition." Kunene's use of that tradition embraces the techniques of the poetry and the philosophical features of its thought. In one of his earlier poems, "Elegy," his use of the Zulu epic form and dependence on ideas taken directly from his vernacular poetic tradition are intricately woven into the beginnings of his own personal style. It is, however, impossible to think of him as anything other than a Zulu poet whose art, even though written, owes its impact to the oral traditions.

The poem "Elegy" captures those elegiac feelings, expressed in understatements, calculated to disguise the intense sense of loss which the death of a particular man engenders and the meaning and impact of the symbolic death that the clans have suffered:

      O Mzingeli son of the illustrious clans       1
      You whose beauty spreads across the Tukela estuary
      Your memory haunts like two eagles
      We have come to the ceremonial ruins
 
      We come to mourn the bleeding sun        5
      We are the children of Ndungunya of the Dlamini clan
      They whose grief strikes fear over the earth
      We carry the long mirrors in the afternoon
      Recasting time's play past infinite night.
      O great departed ancestors                  10
      You promised us immortal life with immortal joys
      But how you deceived us!
 
      We invited the ugly salamander
      To keep watch over a thousand years with a thousand sorrows
      She watched to the far end of the sky       15
 
      Sometimes terrorized by the feet of departed men
      One day the furious storms
      One day from the dark cyclone
      One day in the afternoon
      We gazed into a barren desert               20
      Listening to the tremendous voices on the horizon
      And loved again in the epics
      And loved incestuous love!
 
      We count missions
      Strewn in the dust of ruined capitals         25
      The bull tramples us on an anthill
      We are late in our birth
      Accumulating violent voices
      Made from the lion's death
      You whose love comes from the stars       30
      Have mercy on us!
      Give us the crown of thunder
      That our grief may overhang the earth
      O we are naked at the great streams
      Wanderers greet us no more.                 35

Kunene's debt is more to the elegiac tradition than to the epic one, even though the latter also comes into play. The poem begins with two lines of praise to the dead man, Mzingeli. The "illustrious clans" of line 1 establishes the dead hero's ancestry firmly in the tribe; line 2 describes his beauty, employing the typical Zulu style of linking the abstract concept with natural phenomenon, here the Tukela estuary, which suggests the brightness of waters and their many arms spread at an estuary. Line 3 links him heraldically with the eagles, brave predatory birds of dazzling strength. Line 4 emphasizes the desolation that has swept over the place of ceremonies, suggesting that when a sacred abode is destroyed, the ultimate abomination over-takes the people. Mzingeli is seen as the "bleeding sun," red with blood at its setting. So far, all the images, as in traditional Zulu poetry, are derived entirely from nature, emphasizing the link between man and the universe. In these images the related aspects of nature do not retain their own autonomy, but exist as elaborate features of the man they represent. Ndungunya is the immediate ancestor of the mourners of the Dlamini clan. Note that throughout the poem the poet uses the "we" of the traditional poem. "Where individualistic societies read 'I,' this philosophy [traditional Zulu thought] requires one to read 'I on behalf,'" Kunene states, insisting upon the communality of the poet's work. Lines 6 to 9 express in very visual and dramatic terms the image of the mourners in their fearful grief reflecting in their sorrow the "infinite night" of despair and dispossession. The mirrors reflect the sorrows of the past beyond the afternoon. This concludes the first section of the poem, illustrating an adherence to the Shakan form of the statement, its extension, development, and conclusion, as it deals here with the elegiac theme. Lines 10 to 12 use the voice of chastisement for the departed ones, a voice very common to the poetry of prayer and libation, which is independent of the dirge but tends to be incorporated within it, as can be seen in the Ewe dirge. These three lines are treated as a separate segment within the poem; it, however, leads to the fourth segment to which it is united by the reference to the departed men. This segment, lines 13 to 20, stresses the sorrow. The "ugly salamander" shares the myth of creation, resistant to fire and storms. The segment also recalls in its sweeping images the journey of the Zulu across vast expanses to their present homes under the supervision of the totemic salamander. Lines 17 to 19 illustrate the use of parallelism, a feature of the oral Zulu style; here employing the simple technique of repetition to create the parallels. The "voices in the horizon" refers to the voices of the departed men who accompanied them on this journey, emphasizing for them the primordial bonds of blood (incestuous love) and the heroic dimensions of their history. The fifth segment picks up again the theme of the desolation, employing now more precise images again drawn from nature. Line 25 suggests the after-scene of a battle, destruction and carnage conjured vividly in the image of the bull elephant trampling the people upon an anthill of line 26. The mourners see themselves as the latecomers after the battle is over, men born into a world that only bears the signs of destruction that has been; "violent voices" are shouts and sounds of mourning; the "lion's death" refers again to the particular death, that of Mzingeli, who is now seen as a lion, the symbol of heroism. Heroism, desired even into death, is the essential element of ancestorhood. The stars in Zulu thought express, along with the moon and the sun, the "nature of distance and the quality of light while also being symbolic of power." This power will be expressed now through the benevolence that will give those left behind the "crown of thunder," whose voice, like the rainbow, will "overhang the earth." The last two lines of the poem return to the concept of desolation, which is poignantly expressed in the image of being naked at the stream. Yet this line also carries a sense of cleansing and rejuvenation, emphasizing for the suppliants, naked and weak, the blessed regenerative powers of the "great streams."

Of such wanderers or travelers in Zulu culture, Kunene writes:

Many romantic stories and myths are associated with travelers, who in old days were very common. The traveler acquired a special place in the culture both because many people were themselves likely to travel (unyawo alunampumulo—the feet know no rest), and also because the traveler puts to test what was one of the important ethical demands, namely, generosity. Unless you had been generous to a stranger whom you may never have met again, your generosity was still in doubt. This gave rise to a number of idioms like "never shut your door to a stranger, 'no hill is without a graveyard.'"

There is a series of short poems by Kunene that reflect a pre-Shakan technique of putting statement, extension, development, and conclusion in single lines. One very successful poem in this vein, using the imagery of the homestead and war, is "The Day of Treachery":

       Do not be like the people of Ngoneni
       Who rushed with warm arms
       To embrace a man at the gates
       And did likewise on the day of treachery
       Embracing the sharp end of the short spears.

This poem is didactic, a moralizing aspect of oral literature. The image of embrace within the content of Zulu culture is extended from the embrace of a man, signifying brotherhood and kinship, to "embracing the sharp end of the short spears," the price for treachery. The reference to the people of Ngoneni will be obvious perhaps to a Zulu listener for whom the treachery of the people of Ngoneni is apparently part of local history.

In another poem, "Gifts Without Recipients," Kunene recaptures the same elegiac voice that marked "Elegy," pushing into nine lines the same pathos and sense of desolation that characterized the longer poem.

       Where were you the day we arrived with Nomalizo
       Coming to bring ours and others' gifts?
       Why did you not leave the imprints of your hands
       So that we may count the fingers of the years,
       Saying he has not departed like a river
       Which leaves with the silence of death.
       Alas! You left ruins as big as mountains
       Haunted by the hubbub of bats
       Who mocked us with their wings.

Nomalizo is the bride accompanied by gifts and the bridal procession to the lover's homestead, only to meet with the ruin and desolation that have overtaken him. The "silence of death," the haunting sound of bats who are a symbol of decay, the image of the departed river, all emphasize the desolation. The exaggeration of "ruins as big as mountains" is a feature shared by oral poetry, in its intrinsic dependence on hyperbole for an awesome effect. It is meaningful also in terms of the nature of the Zulu country marked by mountains and hills.

In "Sadness on a Deserted Evening" Kunene's sense of loneliness, using the same structure as in the other poems, becomes personalized. While "Elegy" mourns the death of a community, this poem expresses the intense agony of the individual poet, even though in the oblique manner which is characteristic of the Zulu tradition:

       O Mantantashiya
       Your child is crying
       Alone, after the devastation of the earth.
       Listen to it departing
       With all the lion winds
       That are pierced with spears.

In a typical praise poem called "Sons of Vulindlela" Kunene captures the aurality of the Zulu poetic chant which uses the common technique of repetition in order to achieve a cumulative effect: there is a narrative quality in the repetition of the deeds of Vulindlela's sons until the last two lines which represent, in the Shakan style, the conclusion, drawn from the statement of line 1 and the extension of lines 2 to 9.

      Happy are the sons of Vulindlela              1
      Who are armed with swords of thought
      Who cut the roots of an unknown plant
      Who begin from the beginning of beginnings
      Who upturn stones lurking with scorpions   5
      Who shout at the running buck
      Who return a hundred times with tales
      Who stood stretched into the horizon
      Who rushed above with a thousand years
      It is they who will not be shaken              10
      Who have no fear of the hostile winds.

Kunene's most ambitious poem, "Anthem of Decades," utilizes the style of the long Zulu epic poem which at times runs to five hundred or more lines. What appears in his collection Zulu Poems is only an extract of 186 lines. This epic, he writes, "does not aim at narrating mythologies of the past, but at projecting the conceptions of life and the universe according to African (Zulu) belief and interpretation. I have used the story of the origin of life and added my own detailed descriptions according to the dictates of Zulu culture."

In "Anthem" Kunene endeavors to create deities out of the Zulu mythological idea of the female and male thunder (a concept present in Ewe mythology also), allying them with Nomkhubulwane, the Zulu goddess of plenty, and the concept of the universal creator, Unkulunkulu, the very earliest progenitor. Somazwi represents the concept of evil, the opposing force which concludes the contradictory but complementary system of the universe. He does not represent evil per se, since the idea is not prevalent in most African philosophies, but rather, like Eshu-Elegba of Yoruba myth, represents the opposing force, that in its intrinsic nature embodies the power to elicit only what is good and harmonious from his innate oppositional actions. The epic characterizes the victory of one force over another; the victor, representing a higher morality and will, triumphs not because he is good and the other is evil; in his victory will be shown his humility dramatized in the act of cleaning the vanquished combatant's wounds. As Kunene points out, the characters are not gods, but personalized ideas, representing anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe as embedded in Zulu philosophy and thinking. Imprecise, the Zulu concept of the deity or Supreme Creator shares a pantheistic nature that is clouded in vagueness and mystery.

The poem opens with Zulu creation myth, which significantly begins with the birth of time. Then comes the description of the earth which heaved "like a giant heart," the "crooked mountains," and the stars thrusting out "their swords of light." Then, the Creator, tearing away the blanket that covers the mysteries,

      Created heaven and earth
      Filled this planet with the commotion of beasts.

He himself walked the paths of the skies, looking at the mountains, the racing of great rivers and spacious oceans. The primeval era of the creation is marked by carnage, the lion and his allies feeding on those not ferocious, as

      Life must continue
      And good things must feed the ruthlessness of
      appetites.

The Creator's messengers were Sodume, the male thunder whose essence is fertility, Sino, the essence of limits. Nodume, Sodume's wife, whose personality softens the ferociousness of her husband's thunderings across the heavens and whose pet was the bluebird; and Nomkhubulwane, the "source of all life," "giving abundance to the earth." These functionaries performed the Creator's bidding, in preparing the world for the beasts, and the birds of the air. What was left to be created was man:

       He who will bind all things of existence.
       A great shepherd who excels with wisdom.

Then there was Somazwi, the essence of evil, "who speaks with the vehemence of fire" with his entourage of praise singers. His power is opposed to man, to his knowledge which will excel all created things. He predicts for man an unfulfilled tomorrow and a predilection for building dreams "that will never be fulfilled," a condition of vagabondage and despair. A debate ensues between Sodume and Somazwi as to the need for creating man. Nomkhubulwane intervenes, with the argument that

       Creation must always create
       Its essence is its change.

And to love its greatness is not to question it. For man, yet to be created,

       shall derive his power
       From the very struggle of incomplete power
       Which alone will rouse his mind with the
       appetite of wisdom.

Sodume endorses the creation of man. When the debate was over, with the gathering also airing its views, mainly in support of the princess of creation and Sodume, a feast was held at the house of Somahle, the source of all pleasure; much beer was drunk, as Sodume threw fire balls across the heavens, displaying lightning in the horizon:

       Its flashes making paths in the sky
       Those who like to play sped down on them
       Swinging from ray to ray as they descended to the earth.

Kunene writes of this poem: "As the epic develops there will be no Satan banished into limbo and made to suffer eternal damnation. Such an action would damn the victor and show him as weak." It seems that in this poem Kunene attempts to unite the principles of creation and of the struggle between forces as contained in Zulu thought. The material is completely derived from Zulu cosmology. It is obvious also that the poem is suggested by Paradise Lost, even though its denouement presents a vision totally different from that of the Christian epic. Its predilection for abstractions seems obviously to be based upon an attempt to achieve for it a preciseness. But the language and style are based in Zulu imagery. The principles that inhabit the landscape of the poem share of the Zulu conception of the world and express its creation myths.

Kunene's work on traditional Zulu poetry has been significant in that he determined the historical features and development of the oral poetic art before and after Shaka's rule. It is obvious that his own poetic center is firmly fixed in this tradition. It should be remembered that the impact of these poems rests in their being heard aloud, in the atmosphere of drama, the excited participation, and in the native Zulu sounds.