M. SOGA MLANDU

Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana is a celebrated South African author and curator at Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. His debut novel The Faint‑Hearted Man (1991) was long‑listed for the Noma Award. His poetry collections, including Scatter the Shrilling Bones (2003) and Dark Lines of History (2023), have earned critical acclaim and literary awards.

To many readers of English literature, Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana is known for his previous publications — his novel The Faint Hearted Man (Buchu Books, 1991) which he published while doing matric at Kama High School. Through legal precincts and contractual obligations constraining the community-based publishing house that discovered the young Xhegwana, this work is found in almost every public library in South Africa and also other university libraries and legal holding institutions abroad. It should also be noted that this debut work competed for the then coveted Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.

After a gap of almost 12 years, this was followed by his first poetry collection Scatter The Shrilling Bones (Lovedale Press, 2003). A portion of this publication was previously included in a thesis for his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing which he obtained in 2002 from the University of Cape Town. At a certain point, this important work was also in the prescription list for Grade 11 in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.

I bought a personal copy of Dark Lines of History from Mr Xhegwana when we met at the 2023 Amazwi based annual Arts Festival (Litfest) where he works as a research curator. I already knew Sithembele Xhegwana from our initial meeting at the book fair which was held by Mr Mxolisi Nyezwa’s Imbizo Publishing in 2003 in Nelson Mandela Bay where, just after his first collection of poems was published, he represented Lovedale Press.

This Afrocentric poetry of Mr Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana, which prides itself on its originality, humanity and spontaneity mainly celebrates Africa’s greatness – its past and present glory. One might correctly see it as being rooted on the 1960s philosophy of Black Consciousness as it stringently pays homage to Africa’s culture, history, systems and institutions. 

In this book, he has a number of praise-songs on African history figures. In a poem ‘Hintsa’s Portrait’ (p. 9) Xhegwana praises King Hintsa of amaXhosa for his heroism as commander-in-chief of the amaXhosa warriors that resisted the colonial infiltration in the nine Frontier Wars. He also laments King Hintsa’s death in that most brutal confrontation, particularly the mutilation of his body and the consequent exportation of his head to England:

Here he stands, as a figure
 
of Xhosa Royalty. That only

through political manoeuvring,

Smith could be the true meaning

of a traitor.

Yet, this portrait cannot reflect

the realities of the many voices
 
still crying for a ceded throne,
 
Of which the climax was

the burning of Hintsa’s kraal
 
and the mutilation of his body.
 
And even more, the exportation
 
of the king’s head to the colonial

masters… 

On the above-mentioned sentiments Professor Ndlela of the University of South Africa department of English states, 

From an award-winning poet, including the most coveted South African Literary Award in 2024, these poems constitute a significant addition to our post-1994 literary landscape. Autobiographical in nature, they constitute more than a quilt-like portrait of the author’s trials and tribulations. They also embrace and reflect on the South African historical and socio-political burdens. By default, Xhegwana emerges as someone who wears many caps: a diviner, a poet, a historian, and a preacher. In some of these poems, he takes the reader back to the turbulent days of the Xhosa wars of resistance against marauding British colonizers who were armed with the bible, the gun and the cannon.

The above-mentioned scholar continues,

Speaking with a multiplicity of voices, we also hear echoes of Mtshali, Sepamla and Serote’s strident voices in this exciting oeuvre. This is a revolutionary project that makes a strong case for the centering and recognition of the indigenous knowledge system — systems that were bastardised in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Not only that – these poems are also a response to the country’s decolonisation of the curriculum paradigm. In one of his poems published elsewhere, ‘Ngxingxolo’, Xhegwana writes:

‘Huge barrels filled to the

brim with sorghum foams,
 
sacred herbs indulged, only
 
fit for a future king’s home-

coming celebration. A royal house

sanuse officiating the assembly,

floating above the lifted hands of the
 
shimmering waters, enroute the
 
concealed abode of the faded
 
prince, a lion kareose, umnweba,
 
venerated kingship stuff and relics
 
of a regal Xhosa throne.’

In the poem, ‘In Memory of Makhanda’ (pp. 49-51) he praises Makhanda ka Nxele, the visionary who was deployed to a certain wing of the Xhosa Kingdom for his bravery in the war that was between  amaXhosa and British armies. This particular heroic encounter culminated in Makhanda being arrested and imprisoned in Robben Island:

… You marched down, and embraced

The pains of your people
 
Not only that you were
 
On the battle line
 
And never feared,
 
And never moved…

Also, at the centre of this work, is Xhegwana’s self-portrait, particularly his religious life.

Poems like ‘Homecoming’ (pp. 17-18) and ‘Rites of Passage’ (pp. 4-5) mark his spiritual journey from being an ordinary member of Methodist Church to a devout Christian, the ‘saved’, then to being a leader of his own church, and later being an ancestor worshiper who has undergone the diviner’s training as a sangoma who combines the reading of the Bible (ukuhlahluba), oracle cards and the throwing of bones for his consultations (do we perhaps have another Credo Mutwa now?).

In their binary manner, Christianity and the Western canon of education are both culprits for his own version of ‘exile’. The first paragraph of the ‘Introduction Note’ (pp. v-viii) of this book goes thus: ‘As clearly articulated in my recently published essay, “Notes On An Aesthetic”, the promise of education and the redemption promised by the Christian Bible laid its claims on me through disastrous, monstrous experiences.”

Then in the poem, ‘A Reminder’ (pp. 33-34), which is one of many powerful poems in this collection, he identifies two forces that he says are competing for control over him, that is the village and the city, that he coins as two great forces. He euphemistically tells the reader that he is a man of two worlds — the village and the city. This polarity of life is a trend for African citizens:

think of me

when the country
 
and the city seem

to be pointing
 
fingers at each other
 
as if they were servants

serving different masters.
 
It was my theme.
 
think of me
 
when these two great

forces that work behind
 
the scenes of our lives
 
lay their bruising
 
claims on the object:

an image, of my poetry.

When they bang and hit
 
the mystery object: my
 
image helplessly caught
 
in between beyond any

point of recognition.
 
It is still my theme.

think of me

when the country hobbles
 
around to greet the city.
 
I would never say such.
 
the dreams of the 

blazing flames projected
 
towards the city trouble
 
my mind, the hope of a
 
damned hell posthumously
 
awarded to the ‘troubled’

village is a big joke. 

This would never be my dream.
 
think of me

when two simple humans
 
struggle to hear each other. 

I persist,
 
It is my theme:

when the country and
 
the city fail to recognize
 
the earth which will

always be the common
 
factor. 

As the abovementioned poems confirm, Mr Xhegwana’s style of writing is simple. It is actually aligned to that of the writers of the People’s Poetry which was written in South Africa and Southern Africa during the struggle period of 1970s and 1980s. It is called so because of the following reasons: its poetics are decodable to all categories of readers (poets, academics and general audience); its concerns are about daily matters of the ordinary people and it can be performed. The list is endless. 

On top of that, each of Mr Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana’s poems achieves the aesthetic of what I believe a poem should; not only an intellect-stimulator but a soul-bound, compressed and patternized expression with clues for the reader to understand and appreciate ramifications of its subject.

His excellent style of writing is also embedded in the following poem, ‘Death Wish’ (pp. 15-16). As argued by Professor Ndlela, as elucidated in the above-mentioned poem, at times he comes across as a rebellious child questioning things that were considered sacrosanct by traditionalists:

Tell them I am dead,

To all the wishes of the dead.
 
The stars, the moon, what more?

No longer matter in my world.
 
Tell them I am dead,
 
Stone-dead, beneath the red-dotted sky.

The drizzling, down-pouring of the rain

Struggle to touch my sand-coarsened lips.

The winds that stride can no longer move me

The waves, the storms can no longer shake me.
 
I am dead,

To the songs sung by the ghosts of yesterday.

I am dead, 

To the clinker of the spears and the shadows of the shields.

The goat, the groaning bull,
 
Is no redemptive equivalent:

I am dead also,

To the trickery of the foreign gods
 
I will not mourn the black beauty.

I will not detest the white legacy. 

Perhaps I should conclude this review with an editorial note by New Contrast’s Sihle Ntuli, reflecting on Mr Xhegwana’s isiXhosa submission to the September 2023 issue of the journal:

The amazing isiXhosa poetry of AMAZWl’s Sithembele Xhegwana reminds us of the beauty of our indigenous languages. The question of the need to ghettoise our cultures and heritage for a single month is still quite baffling. So dear reader, this may be the point at which one should meditate and consider replacing the term ‘decolonisation’ in favour of the word ‘reindigenisation’, as there is a current debate about the former still centring the coloniser.