SIMON GIKANDI

One of the great ironies surrounding the production of African knowledge in the first half of the twentieth century was that, even as colonial institutions sought to extend their hold over the continent through a regime of documentation, a new generation of Africans had embarked on a silent textual revolution whose goal was nothing less than the rethinking of their identities and modes of being in the age of empire. While they are barely acknowledged in Euro/American accounts on the production of African knowledge, writers working in African languages are legendary among their own communities of readers. In fact writers such as Daniel Fagunwa (Yoruba), Magema Fuze (Zulu), Gaakara Wanjau (Gikuyu), Ham Mukasa (Buganda), Sol Plaatje (Tswana) and Thomas Mofolo (Sesotho) were at the forefront of producing narratives in African languages in the grey zone between the colonizer and the colonized. Often confined to the role of native informants, or expelled from the mission schools and churches that had created them in the first place, these writers laid the foundation for the politics and poetics of decolonization. Elsewhere, I have called these writers ‘untutored’ intellectuals, not because they were uneducated but because they operated outside the rules and practices that governed the production of African knowledge within the authorized institution of the colonial university.^{[1]I discuss the cultural politics of early African writers in Imagining Decolonization: African Literature and its Public 1890-1980 (forthcoming). For colonialism and the regime of documentation, see Sean Hawkins’ Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter Between the  LoDagaa and ‘the World on Paper’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 11-23.} They effectively created an African reading public on the margins of the colonial system. And if these writers have proven difficult to read or analyse within the colonial or postcolonial episteme, it is because their aspiration – the need to produce African knowledge, not in opposition to the colonial episteme but outside it – does not fit well with the binary discourse (the West and the Rest) that was cultivated by the nationalist elites produced by the colonial university.^{[2]This binary, common with postcolonial elites in the first decades of independence in Africa, was popularized by Chinweizu in The West and The Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (New York: Vintage, 1975).}

The ‘untutored’ intellectuals were, of course, privileged within the new colonial order: they were often the first in their communities to acquire literacy; they grew up in Christian households; they were educated at mostly mainstream Protestant missions, and they were surrounded by the aura that came with Westernization. But with few exceptions, these writers were also considered renegades from the institutions that had produced them as new, colonial subjects. They were often sent away from the mission because their works seemed too sympathetic to cultural practices – mostly witchcraft and magic – that were at odds with the civilizational mission of late colonialism; their evangelizing projects were praised by the missions, but their fictional or imaginative work was feared and often repressed.^{[3]At the Paris Evangelical Mission in MOrija in Lesotho, to cite one prominent case, Thomas Mofolo was celebrated by missionaries for Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveller to the East), a Sesotho rendering of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress and condemned for Chaka, his historical novel. See Daniel P. Kunene, Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written SeSotho Prose (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989), Chapters 4 and 6.}

S. Machabe Mofokeng’s Pelong ya Ka (In My Heart) belongs to this tradition of colonial renegades, but is marked by a crucial difference – it is a work produced by a member of the elite but in conversation with non-elite readers. Like the ‘untutored’ intellectuals mentioned above, Mofokeng assumed, often against colonial logic, that African languages could function as the basis of a systematic thinking of African Being amidst the chaos unleashed by colonization. But unlike these intellectuals, Mofokeng was tutored. Indeed, he was a product of several colonial institutions of higher education committed to chaperoning the New African into both the cultures and the morals of Europe and the mastery of the disciplinary protocols that would domesticate European knowledge in an African context.^{[4]A discussion of the cultural project of the New African Movement in South Africa can be found in Ntongela Masilela’s The Cultural Modernity of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007).} Given these credentials, it is strange that Mofokeng, one of the few blacks to have a PhD from a premier South African university in the Apartheid period, has not been admitted into the postcolonial institutions of interpretation. It is, in fact, peculiar that unlike E’skia Mphahlele, whose education and career was similar, Mofokeng was not – and has not yet – been recognized as a central figure in the shaping of African literature and its criticism.

Here, contrasts are informative: in 1957, Mphahlele submitted a thesis on ‘The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction’ for his MA to the University of South Africa. For most of the 1960s and 70s, this work would be recognized as foundational in the making of African literary criticism. During the same decade, Mofokeng submitted an MA thesis on ‘A Study of Sesotho Folktales’ (1951) and a PhD thesis, ‘The Development of Leading Figures in Animal Tales in Africa’ (1954) to the University of Witwatersrand, considered to be one of the two top universities in South Africa. In spite of its pedigree, Mofokeng’s academic work remained unremarked and lost.^{[5]Ruth Finnegan captures the significance of Mofokeng’s work and its absence in her preface to the second edition of her groundbreaking book, Oral Literature in Africa (London: Open Book Publishers, 2012): ‘I think especially of S.M. Mofokeng’s sadly unpublished dissertations […] the inspiration and basis of the linguistic account in my Chapter 3’ – p.xxviii.}

How do we explain the neglect or occlusion of Mofokeng from the institution of literary criticism in Africa? One would be tempted to blame it on an old culprit – language politics. After all, as Karin Barber has argued, postcolonial criticism – or the projects that go under that name – have not been interested in texts written in African languages or criticism about them; instead they have ‘promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which had the effect of eliminating African-language expression from view’.^{[6]Karin Barber, ‘African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’, Research in African Literatures 26(4) (Winter 1995):3.} This model has both diminished the place of African languages in the colonial experience while maintaining what Barber calls ‘a centre-periphery polarity which both exaggerates and simplifies the effects of the colonial imposition of European languages’ and turns ‘the colonizing countries into unchanging monoliths, and the colonized subject into a homogenized’.^{[7]Barber, ‘African-Language Literature’, p.3.} Linguistic preferences cannot, however, explain Mofokeng’s absence from postcolonial institutions of interpretation. The reason for this is that, in Apartheid South Africa, the use of African languages was closely tied to a state project whose goal was nothing less than the reproduction of the African as a Bantu, the subject of an ethnic enclave – a Bantustan – and hence a stranger in the white republic. In order to secure the identity of African groups divided along linguistic lines, the state promoted the use of African languages, but only within the confines of its own projects.^{[8]A rich background and context can be found in Nhlanhla P. Maake, ‘A Survey of Trends in the Development of African Language Literatures in South Africa: With Specific Reference to Written Southern Sotho Literature c.1900-1970s’, African Languages and Cultures 5(2) (1992): 157-88.}

To complicate matters, the Apartheid state allowed the existence of active programmes in African languages at the elite universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand. Exempted from official racial segregation, these programmes would provide the training ground of a remarkable generation of critics of African literature including B.W. Vilakazi (PhD, Witwatersrand, 1945) and A.C. Jordan (PhD, University of Cape Town, 1957). Though lesser known than these towering figures, Mofokeng shared their education and pedigree and he cannot hence be relegated to the rank of a native informant. It is not incidental that Mofokeng was a close associate of C.M. Doke, the topmost scholar of African languages in South Africa or that the Pelong ya Ka was published by the University of Witwatersrand Press in ‘the Bantu Treasury’, a series edited by C.M. Doke and D.T. Cole.^{[9]This publishing history is discussed in detail by Nhlanhla P. Maake in ‘C.M. Doke and the Development of Bantu Literature’, African Studies 52(2) (1993): 77-88; and Elizabeth Le Roux, ‘Black Writers, White Publishers: A Case Study of the Bantu Treasury Series in South Africa’, E-rea 11(1) (2013). Available at: (last accessed on 8 June 2021).}  However, unlike Vilakazi and Jordan who wrote for the intellectual class, Mofokeng’s work was produced in conversation with the untutored. He was an insider/outsider, occupying the space where colonialism and nationalism met and diverged.

Some biographical and cultural background might help us understand the dialectic of insider/outsider on the borderlands of South African culture. Eastern Fouriesburg, where Mofokeng was born in 1923 and where he grew up on a farm, is on the border between the Republic of South Africa (more precisely the old Afrikaans-dominated Orange Free State) and the British Protectorate of Basutoland, later the Republic of Lesotho. But this border, like many other lines of division in Southern Africa, was artificial. What it marked was the legal separation of the Sesotho people into two political entities even when they were held together by a common language and culture. Mofokeng could not escape the consequences of this colonial arrangement. Neither could he escape the fact that the road to becoming an intellectual passed through selective colonial institutions such as the Dutch school at Viljoensdrift, where he got his early education, and Admas College, the United Congregationalist Church mission school in Natal, where he went for his secondary education. His higher education would start at Fort Hare, the elite black university, where he got his first degree and end at the liberal University of Witwatersrand, where he acquired two advanced degrees in African language literatures. Ordinarily, Mofokeng’s career, which included a stint as a teacher as the Bantu High School in Johannesburg and in the Department of African Languages at Witwatersrand, would have consolidated his standing as a member of the elite even under conditions of subjection.

Pelong ya Ka cannot accurately be described as a text produced on the margins.

This excerpt from Simon Gikandi’s Introduction to Pelong Ya Ka (In My Heart) is published in herri with kind permission of the publisher Seagull Books (India). Special thanks to Bishan Samaddar.