Listening between the lines: writing about women’s intellectual contributions
Percept
March 2025
By Precious Bikitsha | August 2023
“Ndiyeke ndilale wetu No Inki/ Andilalanga pezolo kude kwasa/ Ndipetwe ngumva ndedwa/ Wani wetu? Au! We Zibuko.”[1]
August marks Women’s Month in South Africa as we commemorate more than 20 000 women marching to the Union Buildings on 9 August in 1956 in a peaceful protest against pass laws. As we commemorate women this month, it is important to honour women who had a contribution in South Africa’s history. On this Women’s Day, I am wanting to consider another woman who fought against pass laws in the 1920s, Nontsizi Mgqwetho.
Nontsizi Mgqwetho was a poet, who contributed to Johannesburg based newspapers, Abantu Batho and Umteteli wa Bantu between 1919 and 1929. She published the bulk of her work in Umteteli wa Bantu. Jeff Opland came across her work in the Chamber of Mines archive in 1976 and it was only in 2007 that her poems were translated into English by Phyllis Ntantala and Abner Nyamende, and the anthology The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho was published.
Mgqwetho moved between Johannesburg and Queenstown and her ability to move was an opportunity for her poetry to travel. In traditional Xhosa society, only those who were at present enkundleni[2] would hear the praises of the imbongi,[3] but Mgqwetho publishing in the newspaper meant that she had a wider audience. Historically, imbongi was one of the few people who could voice criticisms of the way political life was going and Mgqwetho mobilised the voice of the poet in a poetic form on print.
I start with Mgqwetho’s own words because most writers lament the lack of biographical information on Mgqwetho. However, in my own work, I have mined her poetry for biographical information and have seen her work and words as central in understanding exactly who Mgqwetho was.
It also important to see her voice and the actual poetics she performs on the pages of the newspaper. In these lines quoted above, Mgqwetho writes about being unable to sleep and the burden she felt to write. This sense of urgency is clear throughout her work and those familiar with imbongi would know how they spontaneously perform poetry. In her poem, ‘The poet of the ford’, Mgqwetho takes a simple idea of a ford, a place to cross, and expands on it and also embodies the ford in her poetry: moving between contradictory realities of Black life in early twentieth century South Africa. Mgqwetho not only wrote and performed poetry, but she was involved in the 1920 pass law protests on the Rand, she preached in the church as a women’s manyano member and she travelled, participating in public life as a social commentator.
Mgqwetho put forward complex propositions into public life which were very critical, and she hauled the reader into action with her words. In her poem ‘Maibuye iAfrika’ Mgqwetho writes “Uti Maibuye? Makubuye wena izizwe zomhlaba zix’witana ngawe/Zipuma eNode zipuma eSude kwas’ empumalanga nase ntshonalanga./ I Afrika ihleli Ayiyangandawo kangela enc’eni wofik’ isahluma/”.[4] In this poem, Mgqwetho takes a simple political slogan like Mayibuye iAfrika and she turns it on its head, challenging Africans to think deeply about the state of the nation and their own position. Mgqwetho poses a rhetorical question: “Uti Maibuye?”, which she then answers by saying “Makubuye wena”,[5] arguing that Africa has not gone anywhere but it is Africans who need to come back because “IAfrika ihleli ayiyangandawo”.[6]
When I first read Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, I was touched by how Alice Walker honoured her hero, Zora Neale Hurston, by a headstone for her unmarked grave and having it engraved. When I went to Mgqwetho’s hometown in my Honours year with my father, I thought I would be able to redeem Mgqwetho’s memory but what I found was Mgqwetho unrecalled and unremembered by her own family.
Unlike her male contemporaries, Mgqwetho fell out of circulation for over seven decades and archival work is important in telling the stories of women who are forgotten and not part of public discourse and have also been forgotten in their family histories.
As a scholar of History, my own methods of reading Mgqwetho have been about picking up slivers of information and working with the slivers to produce much. We need to think of new ways of speaking about people whose lives had so many gaps and silences and not repeat the same mistakes.
Part of taking seriously the work of women intellectuals is to also think about new ways of reading them: against the grain of dominant thinkers and reading them according to their own terms. Consider who the African women intellectuals of our time are, do we know them?
There is so much to do to undo the erasure of women who played their part in defeating colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Without the voices of the likes of Mgqwetho and many others, our history remains incomplete.
Mgqwetho is not significant because she was a woman, that is obvious, but her work helps us to think more clearly about the state of our nation and encourages us to move towards action in pursuit of a better South Africa.
Precious Bikitsha is a consultant at Percept, and holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours in History and an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology and Economic History from the University of Cape Town. She is completing her master’s dissertation on the intellectual contributions of Nontsizi Mgqwetho. She has worked as a researcher, translator, guest lecturer and facilitator. She is curious about people and is able to simplify complex ideas for modern solutions.
[1] “Ink, leave me to sleep/ Last night I tossed and turned and fell asleep at dawn/ Why was that? Au! The ford.”Nontsizi Mgqwetho, ‘Maibuye! I Afrika! Awu!’, The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, edited and translated by Jeff Opland (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 38-41.
[2] The king’s court
[3] Xhosa praise poet
[4] You say, “Come back”? You must come back!!/ Your profit to all the earth’s nations/ They come from the north, they come from the south/ From the east and from the west/ Africa stayed! She’s nowhere else: look at how the grass continues to sprout.” Nontsizi Mgqwetho, ‘Maibuye! I Afrika! Awu!’, The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, edited and translated by Jeff Opland (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2007), 58-59.
[5] You say “Come back? You must come back.”
[6] “Africa stayed!”
