Thank You Programme director,
Comrade Premier Sibusiso Ndebele,
Other Members of the KwaZulu-Natal Executive Council here present,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Comrades and friends,

Permit me to preface my remarks by recalling the words of a gifted African musician and poet :

See the gathering rain-clouds rise
From the steaming hope of loving hearts
Warm
Beat
Drum,drum,drum
Too long the tongue has tried
Nay,dried
The patient desert
Waits

See the bodies fall
Like raindrops
Nurture deep
Love dust
Root intention

Now unveil

The karoo blooms again
Joyous
Comes the golden flowers
Purple shrubs and sunsets
Green

What shall quench our burning thirst?

Let me drink, let me drink
Let me drink from thee
Oh beautiful Africa
Forever
His perpetual wisdom
Succulent sustenance sustains
My song
Water
Water
Water from an ancient well

Oh beautiful Africa
That's where I'll always dwell

Water
Water
Water from an ancient well.

An ancient well clove the sands at an oasis on the edge of the Sahara in the
medieval kingdom of Songhai, where an African mother drew cool water from the bowels of the earth for the desert-parched traveller to slake his thirst. With the passage of time that oasis took on her name, Buktu, to be known ever since as Timbuktu, or Buktu's place.

Buktu's place evolved into a village as farmers, traders and crafts persons
settled around it. As the population living around the oasis grew, the village became a town and eventually a city with its own markets, schools, mosques, a university and growing library. Situated at the cross roads between the eastern and western savannah, and along the camel routes that connected the Mediterranean with the gulf of guinea, Timbuktu became a prosperous centre of learning where scientists, mathematicians, physicians and philosophers congregated to practice their craft and hone their skills. They preserved the results of their work, their investigation, their experiments, and their thoughts in leather bound manuscripts, which have survived the ages. These have recently come to international attention and our government has taken the lead to rescue these treasures from Africa's golden age from the termites and the elements that might otherwise reduce them to a pile of dust.

The poet whom we are honouring tonight , has drunk very deeply from the wells of Africa’s classical pre-colonial civilizations. He is one among a generation of African writers, poets and scholars who came into their own the darkest period in this country’s history. Theirs was a generation that was in one sense extremely fortunate. Their good fortune was that they completed their high school education in the mid-1950s. They were, consequently, always a few steps ahead of juggernaut of Bantu Education, which was introduced in Africans primary schools in 1955, extended to high schools in 1956 then imposed on universities and colleges in 1960.

Their good fortune too was that the 1950s was the decade during which Africa and the African people began the slow but steady march to reclaim their sovereignty and to reverse the political impact of the 1884-5 Berlin Conference during which our continent was divided up among the powers of Europe. It was a decade characterized by hope, by mass struggles – large and small – it was a decade that witnessed the African people returning to the battlefield to win back their freedom on the terrain on which they had lost it during the previous century.
First in Kenya in 1951, the Kenyan People’s Land and Freedom Army, caricatured as the “Mau-Mau” by the propaganda machine of the British colonialists, took up the armed struggle with virtually no modern weapons. In 1954 the Algerian National Liberation Front commenced a liberation war that cost close to one million lives and lasted eight years. In 1956, the so-called “Suez Crisis” put an end to the gunboat diplomacy the western powers had employed so effectively to subjugate and intimidate countries in Africa and Asia until then. Here, in South Africa, we witnessed mass struggles in the shape of strikes, civil disobedience campaigns, marches and mass demonstrations on an unprecedented scale.

This was the decade of the Bandung Conference, whose 50th anniversary we will be marking this year. It was the decade of the Freedom Charter, of the founding of SACTU, and the adoption of the South African Women’s Charter.The decade culminated in the massacres at Sharpeville and Langa, and the shootings at Ngquze Hill in the Transkei in 1960 accompanied by the first peace-time State of Emergency.

After completing a Master’s Degree in African Studies at the then University of Natal, Mazisi Raymond Kunene went into exile as an activist of the African National Congress. Under the leadership of that great African patriot, Oliver Tambo, Mazisi Kunene was appointed the Chief Representative of the ANC in Britain and Western Europe in 1963. It was while he was serving in that capacity that I first got to know him.

Mazisi Kunene however was not only a political activist. He was also an academic by training, but most importantly, a poet by inspiration. The years of exile, during which South Africa was plunged into an ice-age of political repression characterized by the mass imprisonment of thousands, the torture and murder of political detainees, the execution of others and the massacre of school-children as young as 14 year-old Hector Peterson and thousands of others of his peers, were ironically the period that witnessed him becoming a prolific writer who was able to produce some of the most inspired epics.

Mazisi Kunene went into exile firmly grounded in the poetic traditions of the Nguni and Sotho speakers of Southern African. It was this rooted-ness in the rich traditions of this region that enabled him to relate not only to the traditions of other regions of the continent, but also to the bardic traditions from other parts of the world.

His inspiration came from the classical orature of Southern Africa, i.e. the oral traditions of the first inhabitants of this part of the continent transmitted by word of mouth from one generation to the next. These traditions embrace the performance of tales, the performance of epic poetry, the performance of historical tales, the performance of odes and the pronouncement of riddles, proverbs and idioms. Some might wonder at the use of the term performance in preference to the word recitation. We must remember that though much classical poetry has now been reduced to writing, orature in its original setting, was intended for public performance to living audiences. As Mazisi Kunene reminded us in an article penned in 1968:

:”it is …not enough for the poet to compose his poem: he is also expected to perform his poem. He uses every part of his body, jumps, waves his hands, runs in rhythmic patterns and indeed re-enacts the contents of the poem. The audience itself responds with appropriate symbolic sounds.” (‘Sechaba’, Vol.II.No.7. July 1968.)

This extended also to the performance of tales, fictional as well as historical, when the gestures and movements of the protagonists were demonstrated and re-enacted. The plots of many fictional tales were often captured in songs that were sung by characters in the plot with audiences drawn in to assist the performer.

A British historian, asked to characterize traditional society responded rather impatiently, “prosaic”. Perhaps it would have been wiser to have put the question to a poet of the caliber of Mazisi Raymond Kunene, who would not have fallen back on the prose employed by those who chronicle the past to describe it, but would have had recourse to the sounds, the rhythms, the allegories, the words, the actions and allusions that traditional societies employed to convey meaning to themselves, about themselves, and for themselves.

From the poetry of Mazisi Kunene, from what has been preserved by African scholars and researchers, we know that traditional society was anything but prosaic. Indeed, how could it be when so much had to preserved and recorded without the benefit of the art of writing? And, even after writing had been harnessed as an additional means of recording and chronicling, it was a skill available to a very tiny minority. Our twentieth century experience has made far too many forget that even in the developed countries, mass education is very recent, dating in most cases to the decade preceding the First World War. Even in the present the overwhelming majority of humanity is not literate.

In traditional societies, like those of pre-colonial Africa, poetics in addition to their aesthetic value, were also a device employed to assist memory. I am certain that even in this assembly tonight, many of us can recall and recite very accurately, poetry, we learnt years ago, but would find it difficult to recall prose we had read a few hours ago.

Programme director,

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.

The institution of poet laureate has an ancient lineage in African society. This is a title that was not lightly bestowed on its recipient. The art of the classical poet and bard was in many respects about memory. It was by honing and developing his/her skill to compose and perform highly memorable poetry that a poet established a reputation Orature – the oral transmission of information – was probably humanity’s first means of mass communication. Once the art of writing had been mastered, human beings acquired an even more flexible means of transmitting information. Since the first hieroglyphic was inscribed, humanity has evolved amazing ways of recording, storing and transmitting information. It is through memory that we have made and re-made ourselves as a human race. It is through memory too that we will scale the heights of achievement and create a better world.

The pursuit of the African Renaissance is the lodestar of South Africa's domestic and foreign policy whose immediate goals are pushing back the frontiers of poverty, led by a developmental state pursuing a sustainable economic growth path. We want to create the space for the countries of Africa and other developing countries to assume responsibility for themselves and to offer indigenously evolved agendas in preference to those devised by others.

The ancient wells of African wisdom, past achievement and present aspiration will continue to inspire us as we confidently stride into the future. The people of our continent today thirst for the fresh, clean reticulated waters of modernity and progress. Water that will wash away the encrusted degradations of the past. Clean water that will nourish their hopes and give them the strength to strive for the realization of their dreams.

We thank Mazisi Raymond Kunene for nurturing our hopes with his poetry. I take great pride in anointing him tonight with the title of South Africa’s Poet Laureate!

Z. Pallo Jordan.
Minister of Arts and Culture.
Durban. 5th March 2005.

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