The Xhosa people, amaXhosa, took the names of their chiefs, just as the subjects of Queen Victoria were known as the Victorians, of Edward, Edwardians. Xhosa himself, a hazy historical figure, was one of the early ancestors of Phalo (d. 1775), the father of both Gcaleka (d. 1778) and Rharhabe (d. 1782); Rharhabe was the grandfather of Ngqika (1778-1829). The Xhosa people (amaXhosa) acknowledged the authority of members of the royal dynasty until the reign of Phalo; after Phalo’s sons Rharhabe and Gcaleka quarreled the nation split, whereafter Rharhabe’s followers were known as amaRharhabe, the Rharhabe people, and Gcaleka’s as the amaGcaleka; after Ngqika split from his uncle Ndlambe (another son of Rharhabe, who had acted as regent in Ngqika’s minority), his followers were known as amaNgqika, the Ngqika, and his uncle’s were the amaNdlambe. They were all—the Ngqika, the Ndlambe, the Rharhabe or the Gcaleka—still the Xhosa people, they lived in what they called the land of Xhosa, or the land of Phalo (umhlaba kaPhalo), and they all spoke the language that came to be known as Xhosa, isiXhosa. A number of other independent kingdoms stretching to the north and east of Xhosa territory up the eastern seaboard of southern Africa (Thembu, Mpondomise, Xesibe, Bomvana, Bhaca, Mpondo) spoke local varieties of the same language, but the missionaries who first transcribed isiXhosa had settled in Ngqika’s territory, and that form of the language became the printed standard. Xhosa is the language of all the Xhosa-speaking peoples (also referred to as the Cape Nguni), only the southwesternmost group of which are the Xhosa.
All the Xhosa-speaking peoples acknowledged the authority of a chief, inkosi, and a king, ikumkani, paramount to the chiefs, who were members of a royal clan. Chiefs and kings lived at a great place, ikomkhulu, and ruled with the advice of councillors, amaphakathi. The chief allocated land and presided over court cases, but there were checks on royal authority: inkosi yinkosi ngabantu, a chief is a chief by virtue of people. If subjects were unhappy with a regime, they were free to leave and seek land in another chiefdom. Another restraint on royal power was exercised by praise poets, iimbongi, associated with royal courts, poets with the licence to criticise the chief with impunity in their poetic declamations, izibongo, which served to moderate any excessive behaviour in upholding the social norm on behalf of the people. The izibongo of Ngqika, for example, portrays him as a collaborator with whites, criticises him for the loss of territory to encroaching white settlers and for blaming the advice of his councillors, and offers a scathing concluding comment on his scandalous abduction of Thuthula, one of the wives of his uncle Ndlambe (and thus in custom committing incest), that led to an internecine battle between the Ngqika and the Ndlambe at Amalinde in 1818:
He’s Scandalmonger, mocking men behind their backs,
he traffics with scavengers,
he’s an imp who consorts with strangers,
a black snake that cleaves the pool.
He’s a foul-winged vulture,
a kite resting in swamp waters,
a rogue monitor with one horn,
spurned by his kin and abandoned.
He enjoys snuffling in trivia,
he’s a thornless aloe that still pricks.
He’s a wild beast who devours his own home then denies it,
saying Myelenzi and Makhabalekile destroyed it.
He’s the bar who barred Phalo’s cattle:
whoever raised it would suffer the consequences.
He’s an irascible moaner,
when he tries to plough he’s chased off like the land isn’t his.
Resolute, his stench puts nations to flight.
Leave the hut of seclusion and distribute cattle!
Who would support you
when you’d fucked your own mother? (Opland 1992: 217-18)
The ceremonial poetry of the imbongi, who was always a male, was not the only form of izibongo current in the community: poems were created about cattle or animals, there were traditional poems about clans and lineages, and most people, male and female, assembled poems about themselves (see Opland 1983 and 1998). Even though Nontsizi might have been barred by her gender from functioning as an imbongi at the Mdushane great place in Tamara, she would almost surely have honed her poetic talent in the recitation of clan praises and in the composition and recitation of outspoken, hyperbolic poems about herself and her associates (similar to poem 13 below). The personal izibongo generally consisted of a praise name, a noun that characterised its subject, perhaps extended into a line, perhaps extended into a succession of lines. One of the royal ancestors of Nelson Mandela, for example, was known as Madiba, Filler, the son of Hala, and this name was extended into the line Madiba, owadib’ iindonga, Filler who filled gullies (so people could reach each other and reconcile). Ngqika is Scandalmonger, mocking men behind their backs, Nguso-Tshul’ ubembe, uhlek’ abaneligqo (Rubusana 245); he’s the bar who barred Phalo’s cattle: whoever raised it would suffer the consequences, Umvalo obuvalel’ inkomo zika-Phalo, / Owowuvula ngowozek’ ityala (Rubusana 246). Nontsizi is Uliramncwa akuvelwa ngasemva / Nabakwaziyo babeta besotuka (13: 11-12), wild beast too fierce to take from behind, / those who know tremble in tackling you, or Dadakazi lendada ze Afrika / Ub’hib’hinxa lwentombi esinqe sibi (13: 33-34), duck of the African thickets, / ungainly girl with ill-shaped frame. Such stylised praises, commemorating a quality or deed of the subject, could be listed in any order from one performance of a poem to another: izibongo lack the linear coherence favoured in western poetry, they provide one discrete detail after another, all contributing to the complex depiction of a person, rapidly and disconcertingly shifting in voice and point of view. The lines of Xhosa izibongo are tiles in a tessellated mosaic, rather than a western lyric’s ordered strand of beads. Nontsizi’s poetry exhibits these structural features of izibongo, while at the same time adopting western stanzaic structure and, later in the sequence, rhyme.
Although she writes poetry that draws on the style of traditional izibongo, and at times claims for herself the voice of an imbongi, although she is fond of rural imagery and often speaks as a red-blanketed traditionalist, Nontsizi’s poetry is distinctively urban, occasionally spiced with Zulu, English and Afrikaans words, recording earthquakes in Johannesburg, condemning blacks who ape white fashion and above all bemoaning the lax morals in the cities of the school-educated youth, living at a distance from the moderating authority of rural chiefs and customary tradition. Although she might have lived in Tamara near the royal residence of the Mdushane chiefs, the jurisdiction of Xhosa chiefs did not extend to Johannesburg. Unlike the poetry of the imbongi, her poetry does not praise chiefs or relish in arcane genealogical details: as she frequently comments, Amagama enkosi ayandipazamisa, the names of kings confuse me. Her rousing poetry does not appeal to a narrow ethnicity, as the imbongi’s izibongo does. Her poems deploy military imagery at times, but she does not dwell on the particulars of frontier history. She appeals broadly to all the black nations, urging them to settle their narrow ethnic and political differences and join in a common struggle for liberation.
The Xhosa, living on the eastern frontier of territory increasingly encroached on by white settlers, engaged in a series of open conflicts for nearly a century, the last of which was the war of Ngcayechibi, which started as a quarrel between Gcaleka and Mfengu drinkers at a beer-party and ended in 1879 after the death of the Xhosa king Sandile (Mfengu conscripts danced over Sandile’s mutilated body—see Milton 278-79—but Nontsizi opposes such expressions of ethnic rivalry and urges Xhosa and