Jeff Opland

Jeff Opland

Jeff Opland will be launching his book,The Nation's Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, which is a biography of Nontsizi Mgqwentho, the first published woman poet of note in isiXhosa at the 2007 Wordfest.

About Jeff Opland

Jeff Opland is Research Fellow in the Department of African Languages, University of South Africa, and Research Associate in the Department of Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has taught English and African Literature at the Universities of Cape Town, Durban-Westville, Leipzig, London and Toronto, Rhodes and Yale University and Vassar College. He is the author of Anglo-Saxon oral poetry (1980), Xhosa oral poetry (1984), Xhosa poets and poetry (1998) and The dassie and the hunter (2005).

The Nation's Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho

For nearly a decade, Nontsizi Mgqwetho contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, "Umteteli wa Bantu", the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa. Apart from what is revealed in these writings, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman's poetry on 23 October 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from. Nothing more is heard from her, but the poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. She finds her strength in her own conception of the Christian God, and in Mother Africa, Nursemaid slain by her sucklings, who, she insists, has no need to respond to appeals for her return since she has never left, steadfastly standing by her disappointing people. "The Nation's Bounty" is the first of a number of new titles planned for release in the "African Treasury Series", a premier collection of texts by South Africa's pioneers of African literature and written in indigenous languages. First published by Wits University Press in the 1940s, the series provided a voice for the voiceless and celebrated African culture, history and heritage. It continues to make a contribution by supporting current efforts to empower and develop the status of African languages in South Africa.