(read by Professor Keorapetse W. Kgositsile)

South Africa loses a Literary Giant.

“There are men who find their hereafter
Among the people
You live forever in us
You are all the names
That in dying for life
Make life surer than death”

Those words are from A Luta Continua, a requiem for Duma Nokwe, a poem in which Keorapetse Kgositsile responds to the death of a comrade he loved and respected.

Mazisi Raymond Kunene was amongst the most important creative intellectuals of 20 th Century South Africa.

Born in Durban, KwaZulu Natal, on 12 th May 1930, he began writing at an early age. His first known works were published in newspapers and magazines when he was aged 11. In 1956 he won the Bantu Literary Competition Award and earned a Masters of Arts Degree from the University of Natal in 1959 after defending a dissertation titled “An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry, Both Traditional and Modern”. That same year he left South Africa to take up a teaching post at Roma College (the future University of Lesotho) in Lesotho.

After a brief stint in Lesotho, he traveled to Britain, planning to do his Doctorate. Events overtook that ambition and he was drawn into the politics of the liberation movement becoming the ANC’s Chief Representative in the United Kingdom and Western Europe in 1964. He served in that capacity for a number of years before resuming his studies in the USA when he took up a post at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1973. He finally became Professor of African Languages and Literature at that campus, a post he held until his return to South Africa in 1993.

Mazisi Kunene was named South Africa’s Poet Laureate on the recommendation of South Africa’s writers in March 2005 .

Mazisi Kunene was an extremely talented artist whose inspiration was the history of his people, especially the struggle for freedom and democracy against a brutal system of colonialism, White domination and apartheid. He was deeply rooted in the oral traditions and the indigenous literature of the Nguni and Sotho-speakers of Southern Africa. An African writer-intellectual who was both cosmopolitan and national, he was highly esteemed for his craft by his contemporaries. He was also an uncompromising pan-Africanist, espousing an African literary and cultural ethos. In the introduction to his first anthology, “Zulu Poems”, a collection of poetry written first in isiZulu, then translated into English by the poet himself, and published in 1979 he noted:

“As the Zulu literary tradition had been devalued, I started writing without models, until I discovered (B. W.) Vilakazi's poetry. When I became dissatisfied with Vilakazi and others, I started my own metrical experiments based on the recurrence of stress in the penultimate syllable. Finding this unsatifactory, I then experimented with syllabic metre, but eventually discarded all these experiments in preferance for an internal rhythm which I found in studying traditional poetry. This is the method I have found most appropriate to Zulu poetry"

Mazisi Kunene was both political activist and poet. During the years he lived in exile he regularly featured at African and Afro-Asian cultural conferences and wrote extensively for a number of journals. He was first conferred the title of poet laureate by the government of Morocco during 1993 as a mark of recognition for his contribution to African literature. In addition to employing his art as a tool in the liberation struggle, Mazisi Kunene regarded the affirmation of an African aesthetic, especially with regard to poetics, as an important dimension of the emancipation of the African people, on the continent and in the diaspora, from the degrading stereotypes and literary pretensions of the west. In an essay about the poet attached to king Shaka’s court, Magolwane, which he published in 1967 Kunene remarks:

“…Magolwane’s poetry impresses itself in waves of meaning. The meaning which is not only assumed in words, but also in the structure and form of the poetry.”

The decades of 1980s and ‘90s were probably Kunene’s most prolific. He produced eight major works, in both English and isiZulu, during this time. His three epics, “Emperor Shaka the Great” ,1979; “Anthem of the Decade”,1981, and “The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain”, 1982, were received with critical acclaim and established him as one of Africa’s greatest literary figures. As his colleague and long-time friend E’skia Mphahlele has correctly observed, for years Kunene’s work is going to show us the way. And I would say that that valuable body of work would show us the way whether from the present we wanted to look at the past or at the future, or even at the present itself.

After his return home in 1993, his presence at a seminar or conference not only breathed fire into the proceedings but also moved the young to hold fast to their faith and craft by telling the story of Africa as it was known to her own people. Steeped in African cosmology and the oral traditions of the region he came from, he played a significant role in imparting a better understanding of the pre-colonial African societies to both his students and the younger generations. Last year a number of long overdue awards followed : in March the Ministry of Arts and Culture thanked him for nurturing our hopes with his poetry, as I said on that occasion, taking pride in anointing him South Africa’s Poet Laureate. In June M-Net Literary Awards honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and in September the Indigenous Knowledge Systems of South Africa Trust honoured him with a National Living Treasures Award.

As I said the night I took pride in naming Kunene democratic South Africa’s first Poet Laureate:

“A renascent Africa is claiming its rightful place among the ancient civilizations that have contributed to the corpus of humankind’s shared patrimony of achievements in the arts, in science and the humanities. We owe much of this to the efforts of our poets and writers who have never allowed themselves to be discouraged by the racist myths and outright colonialist lies asserting that ours is a continent that has no past worth remembering.”

Mazisi Kunene departs this life with seven of his works, portions of which were assembled as a presentation by the Mazisi Kunene Foundation earlier this year, as yet unpublished. With Kunene’s departure after a long illness, South Africa and the continent have lost one their leading literary voices.

I offer my personal, heartfelt condolences to MmaThabo, his widow, and their four children. On behalf of the Department of Arts and Culture let me say that our hearts are with you in this moment of bereavement. Draw strength and comfort from the thousands, here and in the wider world, who mourn this sad loss with you. The African soil from which he drew his inspiration will reclaim the mortal re- mains of Mazisi Kunene, but his work will be an eternal monument to his genius. Through his outstanding body of work Mazisi Kunene will live forever in us.

Lala ngoxolo mfo wamaDlamini!

For further details, call: Sandile Memela, Spokesperson for Ministry of Arts & Culture at 082 800 3750.

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