View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.

uk brought to you by CORE

provided by Wits Institutional Repository on DSPACE

Carrying the Cross: Isaac William(s) Wauchope’s Ingcamango Ebunzimeni

Khwezi Mkhize

Submitted in partial fulfilment for the Degree of Master of Arts

In the Department of African Literature
University of the Witwatersrand
February 2008
 Abstract

This study was conceived and developed with the intention of initiating a discussion
around the prison poems of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. That an
African minister had published poems that were initially composed in prison seemed to
suggest to me that a complex matrix of events might have informed the writing of
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Thus this study has sought to read the poems closely against the
historical context that spawned them into being. The imprisonment of an African minister
for fraud seemed to present, on its own, a curious development which needed to be pursued
for Ingcamango Ebunzimeni to be read closely.

My concern with Ingcamango Ebunzimeni is buttressed by another purpose. As a writer,

Wauchope has received attention for largely one poem that he wrote. It therefore seemed
germane to bring to the fore for further analysis a wider range of his writings in order to
understand the uses which writing, as a social and political practice was put under by
Wauchope. The colonial setting under which Wauchope lived out his life informed these
writings and Ingcamango Ebunzimeni in profound ways. At the heart of this study and the
subject that it explores there is, then, a certain kind of awareness of the contradictory nature
of colonial modernity and how, in turn, this forced Christian Africans such as Wauchope to
adopt stances that questioned the benevolence of such a social formation to Africans even
where he and his contemporaries represented an emergent class of Africans that had
assimilated into a largely westernised way of life.
 Acknowledgements

In the process of writing this research report I have been constantly reminded of how the
support and care of those surrounding me has created an environment that has enabled the
work that I had undertaken. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Bhekizizwe
Peterson, whose insights, support and encouragement I am grateful for. From you what I
have learned goes far beyond the world of the seminar room. My teachers at the
Department of African Literature; Professor Hofmeyr, Professor Ogude and Dr Ojwan’g
have, through the years, encouraged me to pursue my academic interests to the best of my
abilities. Your generosity and willingness to play a positive role in my life often went
beyond the call of duty. I am thankful for your keen and genuine interest in the wellbeing
of those you teach. Mrs Govind, the Department of African Literature has been such a
pleasurable place to be around because of your presence. The many conversations that I
have had with my seniors at the Department of African Literature opened me up to
different ways of engaging this work and made me feel less lonely as I got caught up in the
maze of thinking and writing. Adam Frick, Christopher Ouma, Marion Isaacs, Marius
Vogel and Smangele Mathebula, thank you for the many ways in which you have been
there for me. Dr. Mtumane, thank you for having gracefully agreed to undertake the work
of translating the poems that constitute Ingcamango Ebunzimeni.

Abazali bami uThemba no Busisiwe Mkhize. Ngokuhamba kweminyaka ziyabonakala

zonke izinto enanikhathala ngazo njengabazali. Ngibonga zonke izindlela enizame ngazo
ukuthi izimpilo zethu ziqhubekele phambili. Ngiyathemba ukuba nalom’sebenzi
uyinkomba yemiphumelo yenu njengabazali. Afrika; mfowethu, S’thembile no Zenzile;
odadewethu, Lindelani; m’shana, nabobonke engizalwa nabo, nonke ningibeke
emiqondweni nasezinhliziyeni zenu. Njengomndeni wami ngiyanibonga.

I have been privileged to receive the financial support of the Mellon Foundation over the
past year. I hereby acknowledge and am thankful of its patronage of me. This support has
enabled me to focus on the important aspects of my academic work. The contents of this
study represent my own thoughts and labour. I thus assume full responsibility for it.

My grandparents Mandlakayise Ernest and Nodumo Ottilia Mkhize, James Jinjani and
Shuke Pellegrina Nyantumbu did not live long enough to see this work come to life but in
their constant reminders to value education and live with respect for myself and others I
have understood why their lives were lived with dignity (in trying times) and enriched
those of others. I wish that this expression of gratitude could have been uttered sooner. I am
eternally grateful for the time we had them with us.
 Declaration

I declare that Carrying the Cross: Isaac William(s) Wauchope’s Ingcamango

Ebunzimeni is my own unaided work and that the sources that I have used or quoted have
been indicated and acknowledged by means of references.

Khwezi Mkhize Date

 Contents

Page

Declaration

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Introduction: …………………………………………………………………………1
Writing, Nationalism and the Vernacular Press……………………………………...3
Theoretical Framework and Methodology…………………………………………...8
Notes to Introduction…………………………………………………………………13

Chapter One:
Looking in…: Isaac Wauchope and the Vernacular Press...........................................15
Marshalling the Old into the New: The uses of the Past in the Writings
of Wauchope………………………………………………………………………….26
On the Threshold of ‘Obscurity and Exegesis’: Praising and Naming……………….32
Notes to Chapter One……………………………………………………....................39

Chapter Two:
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni: The Difficult Years and the Quest for Redemption……….42
Isaac Wauchope’s The Natives and their Missionaries……………………………….42
“The Ignominous Shame of a ‘Masquerading Minister’”…………………………….48
‘Carrying the Cross’: Ingcamango Ebunzimeni………………………………………50
Notes to Chapter Two………………………………………………………………....60

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..61
Notes to Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...62

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...….…...64
.
 Introduction

In this study I am primarily concerned with contextualising and discussing a collection of Isaac William(s)
Wauchope’s (1852-1917) poems published as Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. The poems were written while Wauchope
was in prison between 1910 and 1912 after a fraud trial that took place in 1908. As a scholar comments, “these
could be the first and only prison poems written in Xhosa.”1
Though interesting in themselves, the poems are emblematic of a unique development in the biography of their
author. As one who had been an avid organiser, social commentator and religious minister in the eastern Cape
Colony since the early 1880s, Wauchope’s imprisonment signifies a turning point in his life; years whose only
creative impulse to be distributed in public was Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Having lived a life that spanned the
latter half of the nineteenth century and some of the turbulent episodes of South African history as the country
moved into the twentieth century, Wauchope’s biographical narrative and the activities contained therein provide
fascinating and important insights into the character of Christian African colonial existence, agency and textual
practices. These events shall be enumerated in more detail below. Ingcamango Ebunzimeni fits into a larger
oeuvre of Wauchope’s writings. Wauchope’s numerous texts drew on an extensive repertoire of genres that
illuminated his broad scope of thinking and social engagement. These writings portend the multiple subjectivities
he inhabited, and the multivalent intentions and intertextuality that suffused his writing. As his writings were often
steeped in their author’s social concerns, their contiguity with the social and political events of the time of their
public circulation does require that one pay careful heed to the historical moment of writing. What is the content
of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni? In what ways does he comment on his state of incarceration? What genres does
Wauchope draw upon to illuminate his concerns? These questions of form and content are pertinent to our inquiry
since they may enable us to begin to unravel the specificities of the poems themselves.

The writings of Isaac Wauchope hold a rather peculiar place in South African literary and cultural scholarship.
Though his oeuvre “spans a period of more than four decades”2 of writing, it has been one particular poem that has
received extensive attention and, indeed, has proven to be a salient referent for situating the theoretical and
conceptual terrain for discussions of black intellectual culture and history, especially in relation to modernity in
colonial South Africa. Originally written in Xhosa and published in 1882 in the journal Isigidimi Sama-Xosa,
“Zimkile! Mfo Wohlanga” – which was initially published as part of an article entitled “Iinkosi Zakwa Xhosa” -
has since been translated into English and quoted in numerous studies of black literary and political culture.
Though incisive, the use of the ‘poem’ in these contexts has resulted in its being severed from its initial context of

1
production. That “Zimkile!” is often referenced and “Iinkosi ZakwaXhosa” neglected has resulted in what I think
to have been the partial reproduction of the actual text. In a previous study, I have sought to trace the journey of
“Zimkile!” through its numerous incarnations and (re)productions in the past three decades of South African
scholarship.3 Moving through and documenting the terrain of repetition and (re)use, however, has recovered a
particular history of “Zimkile!” that is posterior to the ‘poem’s’ initial production. The other site of analysis that
we are now interested in undertaking is that which attempts to locate Wauchope’s writings in their context(s) of
production. An undertaking of a nature proposed here is one that also seeks to address, by raising questions that
are specific to Wauchope’s life and writings, Paul la Hausse de Lalouviere’s concern for the need to re-fertilise the
terrain of African intellectual history in South Africa. Social history, he avers, “has tended to recoil from the study
of formal political organisation and its apparently well-heeded spokesmen as an almost improper object of
concern.”

In the South African context the study of South African institutional politics, especially in the
pre-1940 period, takes the historian into the world of a group of individuals who are variously
described in the literature as a ‘petty bourgeoisie’, ‘an aspirant petty bourgeoisie’, ‘a lower
middle class’ or an ‘upper working class’ – a bewildering range of terms which capture the
profoundly contradictory and mediated identity of that most elusive of historical creatures: the
educated black elite in a colonial setting….Beyond a handful of African nationalist leaders we
know next to nothing of the social history of those individuals who materialised in the towns,
farms, and reserves of industrialising South Africa claiming to speak for the masses.4

Though the present project is not meant to be as extensive or entrenched in the concerns of social history as la
Hausse de Lalouviere exhorts, it is interested in how an educated African elite sought to present and defend the
agenda of their class, and, indeed, Africans as a whole. It uses the writings of Wauchope as a primary site of
analysis in this regard. Because of the extensive documentation of the activities of individuals in the pages of such
African newspaper journals as Imvo Zabantsundu, Izwi Labantu and Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, an archive for the
reconstruction of such histories - thin and non-extant as the details may be in some places - has been made
possible. This also makes possible the reading of the intersection of the various life stories, works and travails of
individuals who inhabited similar social spaces.

Wauchope’s body of works is characterised by the use of various genres. In turn he often traduces and brings
distinct generic modes of writing together in the constitution of poly-vocal texts that resist binary conscriptions of

2
orality and literacy. Wauchope’s works indicate the activities of an individual who occupied diverse social
positions and sought different spheres of engagement and enunciation. I am interested in how texts portend these
activities and pronounce them, furthermore, into a sphere of public discourse. What much of the previous
scholarship mentioned above has managed to do with great insight with “Zimkile!” is to illustrate the changing
terrain of colonial contestation that the mission educated African intelligentsia had to contend with. However, the
nature of criticism that Wauchope’s writings has received has largely been restricted to this particular engagement
with one particular ‘poem’. It seems germane that a writer whose “famous poem,” as David Attwell has called it,
has provided such a sustained interest in literary and cultural scholarship, should be studied at greater length in a
study that seeks to bring together a larger body of his writings.5
To date there has only been one study that has sought to extensively examine the writings of Isaac Wauchope.
Mzayivane Abner Nyamende’s thesis, The Life and Works of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, is concerned with
placing Wauchope “within the socio-cultural and historical context in which he operated and to interpret his
writings in accordance with this background.”6 Though Nyamende’s thesis is rich in its use of sources and
grapples with the diversity of Wauchope’s writings, its forms and imports, it does not begin to explore, to the
extent that we intend to, the materiality of the sources that provide him with an archive of Wauchope’s writings.
As Nyamende elaborates, “his [Wauchope] writings and writings about him and his times were studied in the
following newspapers: The Kaffir Express (1870-1876), Isigidimi Sama-Xosa (1876-1884), Isithunywa Senyanga
(1850), Imvo Zabantsundu (1884-1926), and Izwi Labantu (1901-1902).”7 Moreover, Nyamende’s discussion of
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, placing it under the generic conglomerate of written poetry, offers an interesting yet
cursory analysis of the poems. Though it is of course luring to read a work of this nature through the
circumstantial evidence of biography, it seems equally interesting and compelling - if the poems “remain mainly
allegorical and obscure,”8 as Nyamende suggests - to engage with what the poems themselves seem to be
suggesting. Would the issues raised in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni mark a departure from Wauchope’s previous
preoccupations as a writer, or are there significant areas of convergence and continuity?

Writing, Nationalism and the Vernacular Press

A large number of studies that have focused on the African Christian elite in colonial South Africa have sought to
elucidate, through variant strategies and to contrasting effect, the wares of African subjects whose social, moral
and spiritual outlook had been crystallised in a significant measure through the work of a ‘civilising mission’
which “sought to inscribe in ‘barbarous’ Africans the precepts of a largely Protestant, Western modernity

3
(contemporaneous in South Africa, with the telegraph and press) and to implant their minds dreams of a ‘rational’,
Christian…”9 existence. These explorations have thrown into relief a number of recurrent themes and motifs that
indicate the restless exigencies of Africans whose subjectivities were never entirely subsumed into the morale of a
simply subservient mimicry of Western precepts and norms. Often, “the dreams of restitution and immortality
which lie at the heart of nationalism”10 required of these early African intellectuals the summoning of histories and
strategies of narration that were other than those seen to have been imbibed as a result of their Western education.

Studies of a nature being discussed presently have somewhat been careful about generalising in any manner that
bestows upon their subjects a character of irremediable isomorphism across the South African socio-scape.
Discourses of nationhood as we have grown familiar to them (however conflicted and irresolute our senses of
‘national unity’ and the ‘miracle’ of the ‘rainbow nation’ might be) cannot be easily transcribed as constant
imaginaries that share in similitude and style an affinity with those of nineteenth century South Africa. In a section
that describes the emergence of “New forms of politics” in his history of “black protest politics”, Vukani Bantu!:
The Emergence of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (1984), Andre Odendaal begins by noting that
“the process of incorporation began in the early nineteenth century in the Xhosa populated frontier region of what
is today the eastern Cape, the area with the longest tradition of interaction between Africans and whites, and then
moved northwards as the African chiefdoms were subjugated one by one, until by the second half of the
nineteenth century traditional political structures throughout South Africa had been weakened considerably.”11
However, what has interestingly and importantly been a strong imperative in most of the region mentioned above,
has been the development of a black public opinion and, perhaps, even a black public sphere, through the press.
Thus, as Odendaal elaborates on the development of a nascent black political culture in Christian circles in the
eastern Cape:

The small missionary educated class of Africans which had emerged by the 1870s was by now
thoroughly convinced of the futility of continuing to oppose white expansion through war. It
therefore led the way in seeking new means of protesting African interests. Besides the ballot
box, the press provided Africans with another channel to political expression. Consequently
Africans began to use newspaper columns to debate new options and strategies. This approach is
well reflected in a poem published by one of the early Xhosa poets, I.W.W. Citashe.

Your cattle are gone, my countrymen!

Go rescue them! Go rescue them!

4
 Leave the breechloader alone
And turn to the pen.
Take paper and ink,
For that is your shield.
Your rights are going!
So pick up your pen.
Load it, load it with ink.
Sit on a chair.
Repair not to Hoho
But fire with your pen.12

Subsequent discussions of African literary and cultural practices in the eastern Cape in the late nineteenth century
have similarly indicated the press, particularly those which provided “significant forum for African opinion,” as a
significant presence in the culture(s) of African intellectual activity at the time. Though Odendaal, as with other
scholars, draws our attention to changing patterns of social engagement, as he does with Wauchope’s “Zimkile!”
above, his reference to literary forms, and other forms of address, does not delve, in any detail, into how and
perhaps even why the particular forms discussed might have been used and how they might evoke an African
public sphere. Another important study, Leon De Kock’s Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and
African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1996), focuses on and follows significantly,
debates and exchanges that had taken place across the racial barrier. For instance, in his discussion of narrative
typologies of racial difference, De Kock is reliant on the newspapers of the time for his illustrations.13

To be sure, the press had always been a present space of missionary proselytism in the eastern Cape. When, in
1820, the “first permanent mission station among Xhosa-speaking people was established…in the Tyhume
Valley’, it was soon followed by the setting up of ‘a printing press in 1823….”14 The early journals of the
vernacular press in the eastern Cape focused largely on issues pertaining to the Christianisation of Africans and
the formation of reading practices among the converted Africans. Similarly, while the making of Christian,
colonial orthodoxies was mediated through the publication of Christian and/or didactic texts, its contestation took
place in the media provided thereby. In his article, “The Vernacular Press and African Literature”, Ntongela
Masilela muses on how, partly through the pioneering influence of figures such as Tiyo Soga (1829-1871), “the
first major modern Xhosa intellectual, and those who followed him, Xhosa intellectuals began to negotiate the
cultural space between the European intellectual forms of representation and the African narrative forms of

5
representation”15 through the vernacular newspapers of the day. Jeff Opland more precisely sees the period
between 1881 and 1909 as of the ‘Breaking out’ in the development of Xhosa literature in the vernacular presses:
through the ascendance of Africans into editorial positions such as John Tengo Jabavu and William Wellington
Gqoba, “the dominance of the mission newspaper was over. Xhosa readers now clearly preferred editorial
independence in their publications and political content…Under Jabavu and Gqoba Isigidimi exploded with
traditional literature and featured many historical articles often including izibongo in honour of chiefs and
prominent people….”16 While Masilela has suggested that “the vernacular press was instrumental in fascilitating
the historical transition from tradition to modernity,”17 it remains important to remember that the conflicted terrain
of colonial conquest made the passage to modernity one riddled with an awareness of the injustices and violences
that lurked beneath such benign manifestos as those of ‘civilisation’.

Wauchope’s place as one of the leading early figures of modern African literature in South Africa can be gleaned
through the frequency with which a ‘poem’ such as “Zimkile!” has featured in discussions of African modernity.
However, discussions of the press, both empirical and theoretical, have also provided different insights about the
literary and cultural imagination, especially in the development of nationalist sensibilities. As Les Switzer
exemplifies, members of the nationalist organisation Imbumba, which Wauchope chaired, for instance, sought to
“inspire “the nation” to register as voters, and support Isigidimi (and later Imvo Zabantsundu), the “national
newspaper.”18 The apprehensions of the past and future invested in such a style of imagination are apparent in the
writings of Wauchope as well. However, it is not solely ‘narrating the nation’ that has been Wauchope’s
preoccupation. As an ordained minister, he debated the place of missionaries in the African societies they had
settled amongst. His tract, The Natives and Their Missionaries (1908), provides example of his conviction of how
“the men whom God used as a leaven in the homes of the natives – our Missionaries,”19 had contributed to what
he saw as the spiritual and social uplift of the ‘natives’ of the eastern Cape. He did not shy away from discussing
and raising his opinions about traditional cultural practices, either. His numerous articles and poems, of course,
provided commentary on the prevailing issues of the day and his poetry was a notable feature in the vernacular
press. The poems collected in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni seem to state, once more, religious themes as their author
laboured in isolation in Tokai.

The aforementioned scholars and works cited above discuss the novelty of African cultural work predominantly in
the vernacular press. The amalgam that Masilela sees as having been effected between European and African
(traditional) literary forms are seen to provide the constitutive signatures of African modernity.20 In a similar vein,

6
Nyamende characterises Wauchope’s works (in particular his poetry) as a compendium “that combines both the
Victorian style and the Xhosa poetic skills.”21

Another significant aspect of the writings of Wauchope as historically specific entities relates to the public sphere.
How was an African public sphere evoked and engaged in the vernacular press? What are the practices of reading
and writing that were prevalent and that Wauchope utilised in order to participate in such a culture of reading and
writing? Russell Clarke, following Jurgen Habermas and Michael Warner, has suggested that “the development of
the pubic sphere as closely related to the rise of print culture and production, and the commercialisation of artistic
form, large questions are raised regarding rational-critical discourse and the development, in essence, of traces of
democracy and the tension between democracy and authority, as well as new ways of being public and social
through the text-based public sphere.”22 However, as we have suggested above, the culture of writing that we are
interested in discussing and which Wauchope so avidly participated in, seems to have been born of an awareness
of “the widening gap between modern experience and modern expectation.”23 The assertion of other histories,
sensibilities, experiences and inheritances, seen largely through a preoccupation with nationhood, provide us with
an opportunity to examine how writers such as Wauchope saw and projected their own senses of modernity. Thus,
a close reading of literary and stylistic forms and genres is important in understanding how this work was
undertaken and, perhaps even, understood in the public sphere. It is also from this vantage that the writings of
Isaac Wauchope can emerge in their individuality and contribution to the writing culture of the vernacular press.
Though these considerations seem to provide an important orienting focus on the context of production and the
communicative work that genre often performs, what seems equally important is to seek to understand that such
an expressly secular conception of the uses of writing needs to be rendered with an understanding of the religious
moral outlook of an author such as Wauchope. In his recourse to literary creativeness in Tokai, the stated religious
themes in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni provide for an analysis that could bring together Wauchope’s life story while
it seeks to understand how the literary forms used seek to construct meaning. What seems to also be an underlying
point of intersection for possible analysis is how the tentatively mentioned religious concerns of Ingcamango
Ebunzimeni related to the existential condition of its author, whether overtly or covertly stated.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology

A study of the nature that is proposed is one that seeks to interpellate different analytical orientations. Of course,
to begin with, such a research undertaking cannot acquire the coherence it requires unless its historical moment

7
and context are explicated. The need to supplement textual analysis with context is, I think, of particular
pertinence in this regard for while the primary material to be analysed carries its own stylistic and formal weight,
it also signifies, in important ways, the ‘outside’ of the discursive, or the socio-historical context that supplies
such writings with their motivation. Nyamende’s thesis provides insightful biographical detail that helps to
illuminate Wauchope’s life, works and activities in its historical context. But it is more precisely between the
disciplines of post-colonial studies and the History of the Book that the concerns of the intended research is given
a theoretical grounding.

Stuart Hall’s article “When Was the Postcolonial? Thinking at the Limit” is a defence of the usefullness of the
concept of the post-colonial. I am in particular interested in Hall’s relation of the postcolonial to the colonial. In
relation to colonialism, Hall is drawn towards the revisionist quality of the ‘post’ in postcolonial: “it is not only
‘after’ but going ‘beyond’ the colonial…[However] The very succession of terms which have been coined to refer
to this process – colonialisation, imperialism, neo-colonial, dependency, Third World – shows the degree to which
each apparently descriptive term carried in its slipstream powerful epistemological, conceptual and indeed
political baggage: the degree to which each has to be understood discursively.”24 From this perspective, the
colonial is never emptied of its presence in either its designated temporality (the colonial) or its complex legacy in
the post-colonial era. It is rather a recasting and destabilising of prior distinctions and certitudes that Hall finds to
be the effectual capacity of postcolonialism as a discourse: “it is precisely the false and disabling distinction
between colonialism as a system of rule, of power and exploitation, and colonisation as a system of knowledge
and representation, which is refused.”25 At the heart of Leon De Kock’s Civilising Barbarians is a similar
preoccupation with how narrative is a productive space where knowledges of otherness and difference can be
delineated and, ultimately, contested. However, as both Leon De Kock in his aforementioned study, and
Bhekizizwe Peterson, in his work; Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the
Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (2000) illustrate in different ways, scriptural and “cultural practices are often
conscripted in the creation and contestation of hegemony.”26 It is thus not simply, as Hall’s article seemingly
suggests, that the effectuation of any epistemic vigilance and dissent belong to the temporal ‘post-’ inhabited by
post-imperial subjects, but also within the historical epoch of the colonial, that the certitudes, binaries, and official
knowledges of colonial power and its exigencies can be questioned and alternative spaces of self and collective
narration can be initiated and even projected into a public sphere. In the subsequent chapters that form this study
we shall see how Wauchope’s restlessness with European modernity similarly called into question the

8
contradictions that inhered to a colonial order that primed Christian Africans as examples of civilisation while it
was uneasy with their questioning of the very social order in which they were made to exist in subordination.

The postcolonial orientation is significantly present in studies of South African literature and culture in the terrain
of South African scholarship from the 1990s. The works of De Kock and Attwell have made important
contributions in this regard. Once more, it is a consideration for the analysis of colonial discourse as well as
deliberations on colonial modernity that has preoccupied these works. “In South Africa, modernity is inextricably
linked to colonialism,” begins David Attwell in Rewriting Modernity. Though the characteristically modern
concepts “that we inherit from the revolutions of Europe in the late eighteenth century – ideas such as autonomy,
personhood, rights, and citizenship” find their equivalents “in many cultures, of both the past and the present,
where they exist independently of the Western paradigm,” Attwell avers, it is “the force with which the post-
Enlightenment ideoscape has been imposed on the world over the last 300 years or so [that] has ensured that most
societies have now come to define themselves in relation to it.”27 Moreover, “its promises were offered selectively
to settler colonials and their heirs and to a handful of indigenous people trained as an elite.”28 Concerns with the
works of a colonial African elite, however, cannot traverse the terrain of modernity and its exigencies without
bringing into light how European modernity was both questioned and appropriated by these intellectuals. It is
especially the necessesary relation between writing and politics that is enumerated by the writings of Wauchope
that provide us with textual analysis as the terrain of exploring the specific character of these motifs.

We have mentioned above that the materiality of texts is an important site of exploration for us as well. Questions
of the nature that we are interested in exploring have been theorised and used in case studies in the disciplinary
field generally known as the History of the Book. Robert Darnton, in his overview of the discipline, describes it as
“the social and cultural history of communications by print…because its purpose is to how ideas were [and are]
transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behaviour of mankind
during the last five hundred years.”29 The work of some scholars within the emergent discipline of the History of
the Book has provided useful ways of developing “theory for reconstituting communications in history.”30 Three-
poled in segment, and whose elaboration in a relational juxtaposition is meant to define the space of the history of
“texts in their material and discursive forms” these aspects of communication suggest “first, the analysis of texts,
either canonical or ordinary, deciphered in their structures, themes, and aims; second, the history of books and,
more generally, of all the objects and forms that carry out of the circulation of writing; and finally, the study of
practices which in various ways take hold of these objects or forms and produce usages and differentiated

9
meanings.”31 Decidedly, we are interested in how writing and discursive practices anticipate the circulation of the
work (the material object) or instil in it imagined senses of the kind of communicative work and the effect(s) that
it might be meant to have on its readership.

Roland Barthes’s discrimination between the ‘work’ and the ‘text’ provides an interesting angle into the question
of the materiality of ‘texts’ and the act that is meant to ‘grasp’ its intentions. In “From Work to Text” he argues
that unlike the work, which “is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for
example), the Text is a methodological field”.

The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a
signified….The Text, on the contrary, practices the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory;
its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as ‘the first stage of
meaning’, its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action.32

It is not necessary to discuss in detail where such a theory of the text leads. The relation between the ‘inside’ of a
work and the ‘outside’ of the ‘real’ is suddenly severed as a dis-contiguous relation that is never decided or
guaranteed by the authority of the author. The postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha develops, along similar lines, a
theory of address, although he is more interested in the complicity between the effect of closure and the intention
of determination of the reader’s orientation in relation to the content of a specific address. The “specific and
determinate system of address (not referent)” in colonial discourse, he argues, “is signified by the ‘effect of
content’”. Bhabha goes on to explicate the ideological pertinence of colonial address:

When the ocular metaphors of presence refer to the process by which content is fixed as an ‘effect
of the present’, we encounter not plenitude but the structured gaze of power whose objective is
authority, whose ‘subjects’ are historical….This effects a regulation of spaces and places that is
authoritatively assigned; it puts the addressee into the proper frame or condition for some action
or result.33

One cannot dispute the cogency of Bhabha’s implicit suggestion that address is not a moment of transparent
repetition of a trans-textual reality but the production of meaning. Bhabha’s reading of address is decidedly
negative. Other scholars have instructively discussed address and genre as spheres of recognizability that draw
readers and ‘texts’ into a community of comprehensibility. It is, I think, the institutional and social practices that

10
frame and supply the condition(s) for the act of reading that enable such a arresting of meaning. More and above
the arbitrariness of the sign, it is always important to examine the power and force of certain interpretations and
‘consents’ to and modes of reading.

Michael Warner’s discussion of publics (and counter-publics) has insightfully suggested that print culture is
reliant upon address as a recourse to calling publics into being, thereby intimating the social purpose of the
circulation of texts. (From hence forth, we shall digress from Barthes’s theory of the Text and refer to the text
simply as both the material object and the terrain of discourse that it portends). “A public”, Warner begins, “is a
space of discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic, it exists only as the end for
which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists
by virtue of being addressed.” If publics are to exist, then, they must be addressed. Thus, “a public might be real
or efficacious, but its reality lied in this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being in order
to enable the very discourse that gives it existence.”34 However, as Isabel Hofmeyr has suggested, “trying to
reconstruct the readership and reception of books is difficult at the best of times and in situations of fragmentary
archival resources, well nigh impossible.” Hofmeyr then suggests that one think of genre as playing the “most
central role in the frameworks of expectation that govern how reading and writing practices are structured.”35 A
consideration of these frameworks of understanding and approaching textuality might, I think, prove helpful in an
exploration of writing practices that took place in the newspapers Wauchope’s writing is to be found, which, in
real, contemporaneous time, were calling up and addressing their audiences purposefully.

The pages of vernacular newspapers such as Imvo Zabantsundu, Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, The Christian Express, and
Izwi Labantu have been stored in microfilm in the National Library in Tshwane and have been consulted in the
course of my research. The writings of Wauchope’s contemporaries, even commentary on the issues of the day,
have also been useful as pertinent contextual evidence illuminating either the context under which Wauchope
lived, or the writing culture and writing practices of his peers.
Library research has also been undertaken in order to glean the secondary sources that are necessary for the report.
The theoretical scope is, of course, strengthened with a broad and deeper reading of texts concerned with the
subject of modernity, and African modernity in particular, nationalism and the role of the press in its development,
the poetic and literary forms of the Xhosa and those that prevailed in the Cape Colony. Nyamende’s biography
and literary analysis of the life and works of Wauchope respectively as well as the work of T. Jack Thompson,
have proven to be invaluable sources for my research.

11
Ultimately, the analytical concerns of the research call for a close reading of the writings of Wauchope and, in
particular, of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. It has been my hope that the aforementioned methods of research serve to
buttress and strengthen my reading of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Though it may not be our imperative to read the
writings of Wauchope in a chronotypical manner against his biography, biographical material has afforded me to
glean some important and specific details regarding Wauchope’s immediate context of writing.

Notes to Introduction

12
1
Nyamende, M.A., The Life and Works of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, Unpublished Phd Thesis, University of Cape
Town, 2000, p. 409.
2
Ibid., p. 124.
3
See Khwezi Mkhize, ‘ Citashe’s Apostrophe: “Zimkile ! Mfo wohlanga”, the Unfinished ‘Preface’ to an African
Modernity’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (forthcoming), March 2008.
4
La Hausse de Lalouviere, P., Restless Identities: Signatures of Nationalism, Zulu Ethnicity and History in the Lives of
Petros Lamula (c. 1881 – 1948) and Lymon Maling (1889 – c.1936), (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000),
p. 258.
5
The mention of “Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga” as Wauchope’s “famous poem” is made by David Attwell in Rewriting
Modernity: Studies in black South African literary history, (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005),
p. 5.
6
Nyamende, The Life and Works, Abstract.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid, p. 407.
9
De Kock, L., Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South
Africa, (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press/ Lovedale Press, 1996), p. 2.
10
La Hausse de Lalouviere, Restless Identities, p. 1.
11
Odendaal, A., Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912, (Cape Town: David
Philip, 1984), pp. 1-2.
12
Ibid., pp. 5-6.
13
See, for example, Leon De Kock’s Civilising Barbarians, pp. 85-86.
14
Opland J., “The Transition from Oral to Writtten Literature in Xhosa, 1823 - 1909” in Richard Whitaker and Edgard
Sienaert (editors) Oral Tradition and Literacy, ( Durban: Natal University Oral Documentation and Research Centre,
1986) p. 135.
15
Ntongela Masilela, “The Vernacula Press and African Literature”,
http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/facultly/masilela/nam/general/essays/.vernacular.htm, pp. 2-3.
16
Opland, J., “Xhosa Literature in Newspapers” in Xhosa Poets and Poetry, (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers,
1998), p. 240.
17
Masilela, “The Vernacular Press and African Literature”.
18
Switzer, L., Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa , ( Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 145.
19
Wauchope, I., The Natives and their Missionaries, (Lovedale: The Lovedale Mission Press, 1908) p. 47.
20
Masilela, “The Vernacular Press and African Literaure”, p. 3.
21
See Nyamende, The Life and Works, “Summary”.
22
Clarke, R., Book Frontiers: Reconstructing Readers and Reading in a Nineteenth Century Eastern Cape Missionary
Journal, Unpublished MA Thesis, The University of the Witwatersrand, 2005, p. 13.
23
Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (London: Verso, 2002), p. 49.
24
Hall, S., “When was ‘The Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit” in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (editors) The Post-
Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 253-254.
25
Ibid., p. 254.
26
Peterson, B., Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial
Marginality, (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), p. 218.
27
Attwell, D., Rewriting Modernity, p. 4.
28
Ibid.
29
Darnton, R., ‘What is the History of Books?’, p. 9.
30
Clarke, R., Book Frontiers, p. 7.
31
Chartier, R., “Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader”, p. 134.
32
Barthes, R., “From Work to Text” in Image Music Text, (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 156-158.
33
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 155-156.
34
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” in Public Culture 14(1), 2002, pp. 50-51.
35
Isabel Hofmeyr, “Metaphorical Books” in Current Writing 13 (2) 2001, p. 101.
 Chapter One

Looking in…: Isaac Wauchope and the Vernacular Press

This Wauchope, is he not known as Isaac Williams in Alice, while elsewhere he is known
as Isaac Dyoba and at other times he is called Citashe? Do you say that one who does not
know even his own name can be fit to address Parliarment? (M. Pelem, Isigidimi Sama
Xosa, July 18, 1883)

[Lo Wauchope asingulowa na ubesaziwa e Dikeni ngegama elingu Isaac Williams, ekuti
ngamanye amaxa uve kutiwa ngu Isaac Dyoba uze ngawambi uve kutiwa ngu Citashe. Niti
ke njengokuba engekalazi negama lake nje angaba seleyazi na into angafike atete kona e
Palamente.]

On the 13th of February 1912 Imvo Zabantsundu heralded the release of Reverend Isaac Wauchope from a
spell in prison that he had served between 1910 and 1912. The short notice – written under a regular column
of the newspaper entitled “Notes of the Week” – offers to its readers not only a significant detail of the life of
Wauchope, it also presents us with a defence on his behalf: “he was incarcerated for a year or two, for a
technical breach of the law in trying to act as a lawyer for a member of his congregation – in the same way
Missionaries sometimes act as doctors, architects, and in fact as general factotums for their peoples.”1 Casting
its own report against that of a “Fort Beaufort paper”, Imvo Zabantsundu initiates a corrective account of, if
anything, the moral prude-ness of a man whose actions it considers to have been in the best interests of his
people. Imvo Zabantsundu closes off its account by noting that Wauchope “returned to Fort Beaufort from
Cape Town last week and was met by several members of his late congregation. Whether the fatted calf or
rather the fatted goat was killed it is not stated.”2 The measure of the complex and competing force-fields of
the colonial judicial system and the needs of catering to one’s congregation as a Missionary, according to the
newspaper’s reports, had the result of spawning Wauchope into an untenable web of contradictions that left
him “no longer a complete person.”3 Thus, the end of what would at first glance seem to have been a private
suffering is articulated as an event of public significance.

15
It is difficult to gauge in a forthright manner the thoughts that Wauchope himself had about his condition
while in prison. What remains for us to glean of these years are some correspondences and poems that,
although published loosely over a period of approximately three months in the said Imvo Zabantsundu during
the later stages of 1912, were written while he was held in Tokai Convict Station (near Cape Town). Each
poem appears overlain by the title Ingcamango Ebunzimeni (Thoughts in Hardship) which lies at the crest of a
more specific heading announcing the individual piece. The poems are not introduced in any specific manner.
Instead, each poem appears solitary and unannounced. There seems to be no clear indication to the reader that
the poems have in fact been authored by the same Reverend Isaac William(s) Wauchope we have mentioned
above. To the right of the last stanza of each poem there appear the initials “I.W.” At first glance, it isn’t clear
whether the identity of the author has been deliberately concealed or whether there is indeed at work an
authorial function whose procedures of enunciation are not immediately evident to us. Pelem’s somewhat
jesting comments above portend the complexity of names and self-naming as it pertains to Wauchope’s career
in the vernacular press. These perplexing issues bring up a number of concerns. First of all, how are we to read
a poem or work whose author’s identity may not be publicly known? Secondly, lurking beneath this ‘hidden
identity’, could there possibly lay a manner of being public that, across space and time, has become
increasingly opaque and difficult for us to grasp? Either way, it is evident that reading in this context
encompasses the application of prior knowledges that are not presented by the text to be read. The reading
spaces opened up by this ‘withholding’ of authorial identity points towards the extant “gap between words and
the vast hinterland of memory, experience and cultural knowledge to which they seem to gesture.”4

The assumption that has led me to linger on this point is informed by a sense of the importance of
understanding the ‘obscure spaces’ of texts for they might throw a significant light on the conventions of
textuality and writing that have informed the composition of a particular text. Thus the points raised above
serve as markers for the kind of work that reading involves. An example of this can be drawn from the
comments found in Imvo Zabantsundu quoted above. Regarding Wauchope’s release from Tokai Imvo
Zabantsundu mentions that “Whether the fatted calf or rather the fatted goat was killed it is not stated.” How is
one to read this comment? Does one read it in a literal or figurative manner? If literal, then we would be led to
assume that a sacrifice of some sort might have been made in the event of Wauchope’s return from prison. If
figurative, then who would be the referent of the metaphor of sacrifice? And what meaning should we then
ascribe to such a reference? Imvo Zabantsundu does not disclose to us how such a remark should be read.
Given that the “fatted” calf or goat is prefigured by the definitive article “the” which implicitly presupposes

16
the reader’s prior knowledge of the subject while at the same time it is not specified, reading for meaning
suddenly gains an added layer of instability. In different ways, then, Isaac Wauchope is readily drawn into a
complex network of writing, textuality and reading that incorporates all of these aspects of communication in
ways that need to be explored further. To understand texts in the fashion that I am suggesting requires us to
hold at bay the notion that meaning simply lies within the text, latent and awaiting the reader to explicate what
is to be grasped cleanly across any passage of time. Indeed, some of the most important questions that need to
be raised below are centred around the specific styles and modes of address that texts employ in order to make
meaning. Such a constitution of texts implies the necessary galvanisation of readers as member of historical
textual communities with the agency to participate actively in the process of interpretation and meaning-
making.

This chapter explores the myriad ways in which writing played a significant role in the intellectual, political
and evangelical life of Isaac Wauchope. It seeks to understand the diverse yet intertwined ways in which
Wauchope “drew on ideas of [orature,] reading and writing to imagine, improvise, proclaim, and perform…
senses of individual and group identity” in a social climate where he and his contemporaries formed part of a
Christianised African intelligentsia who had vested hopes in participating in a culture of texts which they saw
as “supreme markers of “civilisation” and modernity.”5 It must also be remembered that colonial modernity
was not without its paradoxes for Christian Africans who, having styled themselves as modernists, were often
left out of the promises of the very same ideas and social formations that they had invested themselves in.
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, in a sense, is fraught by similar tensions and contradictions. The references to
suffering and bearing the cross as imperatives of social being expressed in the poems are not only poignant
reminders of Wauchope’s own personal suffering but are, perhaps, compelling indicators of the extent to
which his life was cast in a milieu of social contradictions that surreptitiously culminated in a ‘fall from grace’
occasioned by processes whose power extended beyond his capacity to assuage their detrimental effects.
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni can be seen as a profound gesture of the restlessness that Christian Africans felt
about modernity in spite of the great distance that they felt impelled to make into it.

* * *

Scholars working on different aspects of African textual practice (‘textual practice’ is meant in a loose,
flexible sense, of course) in South Africa, from the oral to the written, have remarked on how the sustained

17
social changes that occurred in much of the nineteenth century have profoundly affected the very nature of
those practices. In a study published fifteen years ago, for instance, Isabel Hofmeyr saw the need to study
more closely “the influence of literacy as purveyed by mission and school; the impact of colonial government;
and the consequences of forced removals on patterns of storytelling.”6 In a more recent study David Attwell
conjectures that a focus on writing is a befitting adjunct to an understanding of African modernity in South
Africa since for him “writing’s relationship with modernity is peculiarly intimate [given that] By the latter half
of the nineteenth century…what we have come to call the ‘primary resistance’ of the battlefield had to give
way to the ‘secondary resistance’ of the pen – the ‘pen’ representing several aspects of colonial modernity
such as education, Christianity, journalism, and political organisation.”7 However, to develop a sense of
African modernity that envisions its projects and articulations outside of the influences of traditional African
practices would be to deny the extent to which “the African at the crossroads” of history both tried to treat his
“African culture in a dignified and wholesome way” while “beginning to look critically at the new ways and
trying to forge for himself a course that will preserve his interests better.”8 Nowhere does writing, in its
various forms, appear as a crucial cultural and intellectual practice for the mission educated African
intelligentsia than in the handful vernacular newspapers that emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century in the Cape Colony. As Andre Odendaal has observed, “the press provided Africans with another
channel to political expression. Consequently Africans began to use newspaper columns to debate new options
and strategies… in seeking new means of protecting African interests.”9 The impulses that such developments
had fostered are articulated in Isaac Wauchope’s “famous poem” which exhorts its African readers to “pick up
your pen…load [it] with ink” and “fire.”10 Seen through their aspiration to form a “brotherhood of the heart,”
this early generation of modern African intellectuals saw writing in its many-fold forms and inspirations as a
way in which in their “individual experience[s]” they could “identify common aspirations.”11 In no uncertain
terms, writing, the production and consumption of texts held a position that was constitutive to the senses of
self that the Christian African intelligentsia of the Cape Colony developed as a result of their contact with
western influences.

In “The Launch”, an article written to commemorate the inaugural issue of his newspaper, the aforementioned
Imvo Zabantsundu, John Tengo Jabavu conveyed - in a manner not entirely dissimilar to W.E.B. Du Bois’s
sense that the African-American had come to measure his “soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity”12 - that the “weightiest reason” that lay behind the “venture” to the launch of the Native
Opinion (as Imvo Zabantsundu was to be known in English) in 1884, was the desire for “a rope to tow…to the

18
desired shore” the spiteful opinion harboured against the “Educated Natives” who labour for “a civilised life…
by its former friends of the heathen state” and “the representatives of civilisation” who “misunderstood him.”13
In spite of this expressed attachment to the tenements of civilisation and a desire for a felt measure of
recognition from “the representatives of civilisation,” Jabavu goes on to conjecture that

Although the columns in the Colonial Press have ever been open to any Native to unbosom
himself, still, speaking as natives who have had opportunities of observing the newspapers in the
Colony, we have arrived at a conclusion not dissimilar to that expressed by our talented friend the
Rev E Makiwane during the sessions of the last Missionary conference held in this town that, in
addressing Europeans our countrymen felt, rightly or wrongly, that they spoke or wrote ‘out of
courtesy’. One or two newspapers may not have been so conducted as to warrant the application
of this description to them, but unfortunately there are such things as exceptions that prove the
rule. Students of the Native Question then, may well rejoice at living to see a regular organ of
native opinion set up. In that organ they will, no doubt, not only expect ‘to see themselves as
others see them’, but also to see us as we see ourselves.14

Though Jabavu, speaking on behalf of the “Educated Natives”, remains adamant that the latter must “press for
the better institutions of a civilised life,”15 he further argues that an independent sphere of ‘native opinion’
would serve their interests better. This claiming of the newspaper as an inclusive space for the articulation of
‘native opinion’ presents us with a fracturing of the public sphere along lines of race that was before bound by
those of religion, education, and the quest for ‘civilisation’. Indeed, in his early years as the editor of Isigidimi
Sama Xosa, Jabavu was continuously discouraged from stating his political views and he eventually opined
that a more independent sojourn into the public sphere would serve Africans better. It seems what the advent
of printing culture had opened up for the “Educated Natives” was a “new way of being public and social.”16 It
is therefore not surprising that for much of the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth
century most of what Africans had written was produced through the vernacular press.17

The period marked by the emergence of the vernacular press has been described elsewhere as that “of relative
independence and freedom of expression.”18 However, the anxieties that the Christian African intelligentsia
often felt were spawned from their paradoxical location; they were simultaneously within and without the
promises of European modernity and universal suffrage as citizens of the British Empire and subjects of
Queen Victoria. The continued wars that the colonial establishment waged against Xhosa chiefdoms that were

19
fast losing their autonomy meant that African writers had now “to face…the military conqueror who lurked
behind the missionaries.”19 Ever mindful that colonialism and the exigencies of European modernity presented
themselves “with double tongue,”20 S.E.K. Mqhayi ‘praised’ the Prince of Wales thus upon his visit to South
Africa:

Ah, Britain! Great Britain!

Great Britain of the endless sunshine!...
She sent us the preacher; she sent us the bottle,
She sent us the Bible, and barrels of brandy;
She sent us the breechloader, she sent us cannon;
O, Roaring Britain! Which must we embrace?
You sent us the truth, denied us the truth;
You sent us the life, deprived us of life;
You sent us the light, we sit in the dark,
Shivering, benighted in the bright noonday sun.21

As Mqhayi’s ‘praise poem’ so eloquently illustrates, the vigilance and even downright incredulity with which
the Christian African intelligentsia often perceived ‘civilisation’ as a process both ‘enlightening’ and
alienating is indicative of the essentially contradictory nature of European modernity as a colonial project.
That the expressive sensibilities that this emergent class of Africans was drawn to was one fostered out of an
ardent claiming of their supposedly backward traditional past and its cultural mores – through the use, for
instance, of the form and addressive procedures of the praise poem - as much as it was rooted in the acquired
‘school’ learnings of their colonial present, is indicative of the multi-faceted nature of African modernity.
Furthermore, that the vested ideas and developments that were meant to ‘enlighten’ Africans had also brought
a certain ‘darkness’ to descend upon their lives provided for an implicit critique of the failure of European
modernity to live up to its promises and fully enfranchise Africans that were to be deemed by Europeans to be
specimens of ‘civilization’. In the forthcoming discussion of the circumstances under which Wauchope’s
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni was written it will become evident that Christian Africans owed much of their
anxieties towards colonial modernity, ironically, to the suspicion with which they were ultimately held as
‘bad’ examples of civilisation by white commentators and colonial authorities. Given such a social context, it
is thus not surprising that mission educated Africans often felt compelled to utter differing interpretations of
their position within colonial South Africa.

20
The two vernacular newspapers that form a large part of the archival reserve whose perusal my research was
based on are Isigidimi SamaXosa and Imvo Zabantsundu. It is in the pages of these newspapers that over a
period exceeding the span of four decades the writings of Isaac Wauchope are to be found.22 In their generic
variability the writings demonstrate the versatility of their author. Wauchope’s writings ranged from the “form
of letters, articles, poetry, essays, reports, educational presentations, religious treatises, historical anecdotes
and travelogues….”23 This essay is concerned with situating a reading of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni in the
context of its production. I am deeply invested in trying to understand the significance that lay behind the
forms and repertoires that Wauchope often used to address his readers for, as Jean-Paul Sartre has suggested,
“Authors…are historical.”24 This observation is of great import for me since, as Sartre further observes, there
exists between authors and their readers

an implicit recourse to institutions, customs, certain forms of oppression and conflict, to the
wisdom and the folly of the day, to lasting passions and passing stubbornness, to superstitions and
recent victories of common sense, to evidence and ignorance, to habits of sensibility, imagination,
and even perception, and finally, to customs and values which have been handed down, to a
whole world which the author and the reader have in common…it is by choosing his reader that
the author decides upon his subject.25

As many of Wauchope’s writings demonstrate, texts, for him and many of his contemporaries, were the
thresholds where readers formed part of a much larger network of interaction and participation in a public
culture of the Christian African intelligentsia.

In an early article published on the 1st of November 1882, ““Imbumba Yomfo ka Gaba”, Wauchope reports on
a “large meeting” of “African people” held at a school in Port Elizabeth on the 26th of August in that year. He
elaborates:

The Chairman put the matter of the gathering to the congregation with the following words. In
brief, we present his speech thus – “I am smitten!” he said – “For what reason?” he said I am
smitten by ‘Mbumba yamanyama,’ I say why does there persist such an old cleavage between the
sons of Africa who do not unite? Let us be Imbumba, let us bind together in unity. The Boers
have formed their own imbumba in the “Afrikander Bond,” whither our own? This Bond of the

21
 Boers has made strides that surpass us Africans. In Cradock it has voiced its disapproval of our
education. Let us form IMBUMBA.26

The elected chairman of the newly formed Imbumba Yama Nyama was none other that Isaac Wauchope.
Though the association “was formed largely in response to the growth of the Afrikaner Bond which many
Africans perceived to be a threat to their interests,”27 its discerning of the necessity to coerce a greater pan-
ethnic nationalism among Africans is clear in the themes and concerns of those that were present at the
gathering. Wauchope further went on to say “let this mbumba gather different factions – Let it assemble the
Xhosa and the Mfengu and the Zulu and the Sotho.” Philip Momoti, for his part, expressed the hope that it
“Keep the Xhosa language from perishing. Let it ensure that books are written in Xhosa aplenty.”28 The article
closes off with a list of those who had already formed a part of the organisation, further urging those that had
not enlisted their names to do so.

The objectives of Imbumba Yama Nyama’s existence were stated more clearly in what Nyamende has
described as “one of the first recorded black manifestos in South Africa.”29 In a vein similar to the Port
Elizabeth meeting, Isigidimi Sama Xosa stated that amongst other things, the task of the association was “to
safeguard and discuss the rights of the black nation, as well as the opportunities towards its progress, such as”
encouraging the nation “to prepare themselves well with Education, with good Morals, and in Cultural
development,” “to encourage fighting with the pen…by sending petitions to the authorities…By debating in
the newspapers where necessary,” “to encourage in particular the Xhosa language and to translate the books of
that language,” and “to encourage support of the nation’s newspaper, “Isigidimi Sama-Xosa.” ”30 The social
concerns stated above would preoccupy Wauchope for the remainder of his years. As a writer concerned with
the “cultural development” of Africans, Wauchope similarly turned to the vernacular newspapers in his
attempts to debate some of the important issues of the day.

* * *

Isaac William(s) Wauchope was born in 1852 in Doorn Hoek, in the eastern reaches of the Cape Colony. His
ancestry had, in the years preceding the radical changes that would assail Xhosa society in the aftermath of the
Nonqawuse cattle killing if 1856-57, begun to acquaint themselves with the mores of ‘civilisation’ as Christian
converts. His paternal grandfather, Citashe, was a “Ndlambe warrior” who “fought the Ngqika at the battle of

22
Amalinde” of 1818.31 As a follower of Nxele (otherwise known as Makhanda), the influential “wardoctor” of
Ndlambe32 - a Xhosa chief and rival of Ngqika - whose “thaumaturgical doctrine” interpolated Christian
millenarian thinking with the military aspirations of his people to forge a militant Xhosa nationalism,33 his life
was indicative of the changes that placed a growing number of Xhosas at the interceptions of tradition and the
encroaching influences of a European colonialism. “Citashe became a convert of Rev. John Ross of the Free
Church at Ncerha (Lovedale).”34 His father, Dyoba ka Citashe (Dyoba of Citashe), received a formal education
at Lovedale “where he was taught spelling by Rev. John Bennie.”35 Christened William Wauchope upon
conversion, Dyoba named his first child Isaac after his elder brother Yisake.36
Wauchope spent much of his childhood in Doorn Hoek, Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth. After attending junior
school at Port Elizabeth, he enrolled at the prestigious Lovedale College “in 1874 for training as a teacher.”37
His later zeal for mission work was expressed early on in his life as student. In 1876, he was “one of the four
volunteers who were in Dr James Stewart’s [then Principal of Lovedale College and first editor of Isigidimi
Sama Xosa] expedition to present day Malawi to carry on…the Lovedale ‘experiment’” to “produce teachers,
catechists, evangelists and skilled workers” “to the world.”38 His tenure there was shorterned by illness and he
returned to the eastern Cape in 1877.
Wauchope’s penchant for “political reflection and action”39 was already evident in these early years as he
participated in the Lovedale Literary and Port Elizabeth Debating Societies.40 As Hofmeyr has suggested, the
skills of quotation, “erudition, [and] eloquence” fostered in the culture of debating, writing and speech-making
of the societies was part of a larger engagement with the culture of texts and public discourse through which
African intellectuals could develop political opinion and find public expression.41 Soon after his return to
South Africa, Wauchope began teaching and grew to be a figure of public prominence within the realm of the
African community. It was “rumoured as early as 1881 that Wauchope would stand as a parliamentary
candidate for Uitenhage at the next election.”42 As we have already mentioned he was a founding member of
Imbumba Yama Nyama in 1882 and a leading representative of African rights.
The 1880s was a decade of great social and political significance for Wauchope and his contemporaries. As it
wore on, the restlessness with which the modern African could regard liberal Cape governmentality grew to
concern, discontent and scepticism. Though the provisions of the 1856 constitution stipulated that “Africans
who attained the necessary qualifications could be voters for or members of the Legislative Council,”43
Africans would be constantly reminded that not only was the franchise that they prized to be an important
privilege of ‘civilised’ life fragile but that race remained a determining factor in the politics of colonial
government. The Voter’s Registration Act of 1887, for example, was termed Tung’umlomo – “sewing up the

23
mouth [by Africans] – because it involved land held by traditional tenure as a qualification for voting.”44 As a
result of the act, “the names of 20 000 people were struck from the 1886 voter’s roll. The overwhelming
majority [of these] were blacks.”45 The growth of African nationalism in the period is testament to the nation
as providing not only an important imaginary and social site upon which the particular experiences of Africans
could be measured but also that the aspiration to be more fully incorporated into the auspices of European
modernity spawned its own particular dislocations and distances from that dream. It is not surprising that the
Christian African was forced to don different robes and occupy an array of “subject positions” as they sought
to respond to “the many social and political changes”46 of their times. An article - “Simple Justice” - that was
published in May 1885 in Imvo Zabantsundu is a poignant reminder of the hazards that Africans faced in their
daily exploits in the Cape colony. The article reports that

On Thusday, the 2nd April, Peter Wauchope (a Native lad) left Port Elizabeth by night train for
Graham’s Town. When the train stopped at the West Hill Station on Friday morning the Guard
came to the carriage in which Peter was, and asked for his ticket, which was produced at once;
but in the hurry to get out his ticket which he had put in his purse, Peter let fall some of his
money (a ten shilling piece). The Guard at once said, “Get down and pick it up sharp.” Peter got
down, and whilst in the act of picking up the coin, a shunter, Ellenton by name, came up and,
began to kick and strike at Peter who at last managed to grasp the coin together with a handful of
gravel. The shunter continued kicking and striking at him, and even followed him into the
carriage….When the train reached the Terminus Station, Peter was at once marched off to gaol.47

Peter was a brother of Isaac Wauchope. Wauchope, who then worked as Court Interpreter at Port Elizabeth,
promptly wrote to a James McLaren Brown, an inspector, upon hearing that the case of his brother’s assault
had been pursued by the latter. Sharply cognizant of the persistent racist practices that were often directed
against Africans - even with provisions of the Cape liberal tradition and its limited franchise for Africans -
Wauchope expressed his gratitude that Mr Brown had carried out “the strictest justice in order to secure the
protection of the public without distinction of colour.”48 The social ostracism felt by Africans would be a
significant issue of grievance that Wauchope, in his varying capacities, would seek to assuage in the
successive years of his life.
In a longer work, The Natives and their Missionaries, initially published in The Christian Express but
subsequently published as a tract in 1908 by the Lovedale Mission Press, Wauchope reminisces that in his
early life he “he had no aim, or I had too many aims, which was worse still, and at the age of 36, nearly twenty

24
years ago, my eyes were first opened, and I came back to Lovedale a second time.”49 Moving back in time, it
would seem that the time around which his “aim” brought him back to Lovedale would be around 1888 when
the Solomons imbursed him with a “bursary to train for the ministry.”50 This he qualified for between 1890
and 1891. Early in 1892, Imvo Zabantsundu described Wauchope as “a diligent and devoted champion of the
rights of his people, and from his position of vantage in the Ministry much is hoped from his labours in their
cause by his countrymen who wish him well.”51 As a minister of the Free Church of Scotland, he subsequently
moved to Fort Beaufort where he spent many of his remaining years.
The turn of the century and the years that followed were some of the most tumultuous in the modern history of
South Africa. As the South African War was effectively initiated with the military advances of Boer
commandoes against the British late in 1899, “the pronouncements of Imperial officials before and during the
conflict gave strength to the hope that a new political dispensation was in the offing for Africans in South
Africa in the event of a British victory.”52 At the war’s end in 1902, the motions towards “closer union” –
between the previously warring Boer and British establishments - that were subsequently proposed and
enacted by the post-war officialdom were tantamount to, in the words of a correspondent in Izwi Labantu,

treachery! It is worse. It is successful betrayal, for the Act [of Union] has virtually
disenfranchised the black man already even before the meeting of the Union Parliament, which
will complete the crime by solemn vote of the two Assemblies….This is a replication of the treaty
of Vereeneging.53

As Africans could no longer look upon imperial patronage without any misgiving, the more they saw the
formation of pan-ethnic nationalist organisations as recourse to effective political action.
Yet as these years wore on, Wauchope was increasingly drawn into a drama of a different kind. In the year of
the publication of The Natives and their Missionaries, he was brought to trial for falsifying the will of a
parishioner of his. “Eventually, Wauchope lost the case, and was jailed from 1 February [1910] to 10 January
1912.”54 In the year of his release from prison, Wauchope published a number of poems under the title
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. He returned to Fort Beaufort in 1912 and seems to have continued to work as a
minister. In 1916, Wauchope left home at the age of 64 “to enlist as a clerk, interpreter and chaplain of the
South African Native Labour Corps bound for France.”55 The ship that the contingent had boarded, the Mendi,
left Cape Town in January 1917. On the foggy morning of the 21st of February it collided with the cargo ship
Darro and “within half an hour it had sunk with the loss of over six hundred lives.”56 Isaac Wauchope was one

25
of the many that drowned with the ship. In a moving poem, “The Sinking of the Mendi” S.E.K. Mqhayi
poignantly implored those that had lost their loved ones:

Was not Abel’s death the whole world’s peace?

Was not the Saviour heaven’s sacrifice?

Then be comforted, orphans of our nation –

From one death rises new creation;
One man must serve that others may live on.
Accept, and let this pity be your shield;
We say that thus the hurt mind is healed.
And we call old worlds up from the long past:
‘Death is no stranger when it comes at last.’57

Marshalling the Old into the New: The uses of the Past in the Writings of Wauchope

Isaac Wauchope has been described above as a highly versatile writer. What is a sustained feature of his
writing is his resolve to look towards the past in his quest for finding ways of addressing the exigencies of the
present while keeping the future open as a time of possible betterment. That these multiple temporalities were
often coerced into an intertwined interaction through the use of literary forms is indicative of how literary
practices provided a significant expression of the nationalist sensibilities of the modern African. The turn
towards the past obviously provided resourceful ways of thinking through the reinvigoration of the nation. It is
significant that in his attempts to articulate these aspirations Wauchope developed a deep conversance with the
two important figures of Xhosa regents and the prophet Ntsikana. His invocation of these as referents in his
writings often enabled him to elicit a sense of connectivity with the past through the re-membering of the
nation while charting the historical and identitarian changes that compelled the African intelligentsia to place
themselves at the interceptions of multiple traditions.

In a well known and important poem - “Zimkile! Mfo Wohlanga” - Wauchope implores his fellow
“compatriots” to “Lay down the musket/ Take up the pen./ Seize paper and ink” in their quest to safeguard
their “plundered” rights.58 The article with which this poem ends with is lesser known but is crucially
important for understanding the impetus that lay behind the writing of “Zimkile! Mfo Wohlanga”. Entitled

26
“Inkosi Zakwa Xosa”, the article concerns itself with issues of more pressing social and political concern than
the poem suggests at first glance. Addressing the readers of Isigidimi Sama Xosa, Wauchope laments the
passing of the brave men of old. The description is a delineation of the lack that the new man was when
compared to the men of old. To render the observation, Wauchope states “we do not match our fathers.”59 The
opposition that is erected here is further juxtaposed with what Wauchope thinks his generation of men need:
“where are the bards and orators nowadays?”60 This comment is passed in light of what is seen to be a grave
issue: “we would like to put forward the notion of writing a petition addressed to Governor Sir Hercules
Robinson, asking for the pardon of those [Xhosa chiefs] held at Cape Town as he bestowed his mercy upon
Masupha and Lerotholi.”61 The drawing up of a petition is raised as a strategy of political amelioration in the
light of the effective outlawing of any form of armed resistance by a circular from the Governor issued on the
2nd of January 1878. The circular stipulates that

persons living within the Colony who join in armed resistance to the Police or Soldiers of
Government, cannot be treated as warriors of a hostile nation, who lawfully fight against the
soldiers of another Nation by order of their own Sovereign, but must be treated as rebels or
criminals, and will be punished as such for any violence they commit.62

The paradox of what it means to “fight” that is raised in “Zimkile! Mfo Wohlanga” is brought into sharper
relief here for the thesis that seems to underlie Wauchope’s argument is that the expressive figures of the
“bards” and “orators” that he calls for are envisioned as the combatants who may render the new battle “that is
to be fought on an intellectual [and political] plain.”63 The cultural and political importance of literary forms
that Wauchope conceives seems to be an extant of what Gilroy has called the “expressive counterculture” of
modernity that “refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics.”64 The
continuities that the use of forms of ‘speaking’ drawn from the recesses of the Christian African intellectual’s
‘traditional past’ engenders are stark in their reinforcing of a way of being public that seems to be equally
drawn from that past. The use of praise poetry provides a useful example of this. This invocation of the past
presents itself as more than a nostalgic preservation of what once was but is rather a way of calling into
question what the present needs to be. That Wauchope had elected the petition as a form of presenting the
grievances of Africans is significant because, as Bhekizizwe Peterson has suggested, the petition is bent upon
“establishing relations…of power and mutual obligation between triangulated disagreeing constituencies. As a
dialogic form of expression, the petition is predicated on real or imagined historical, cultural or political bonds

27
between the addressee and the addressed.”65 By calling upon his contemporaries to “Fight with the
pen” (“Yilwani Ngo Siba”), Wauchope seems to have been similarly aware that while the petition sought to
turn towards the addressee “as the holder of power”, it was also a way of publicly stating the unfulfilled
responsibilities that they had to those that had not that power. Turning towards traditional poetry, it is
important to remember that it “was never fixed and immutable.”66 A.C. Jordan makes a notable point about
praise poetry when he observes that “there are others [poets] who have shown very successfully that the idiom,
style and technique of the traditional praise-poem can be applied most effectively to modern themes.”67 The
traditional poet is a social figure whose utterances can be both sharply critical and dissenting. As Jordan has
warned, “it must not be thought that these bards were mere flatterers. While they drew attention mainly to the
good and praiseworthy, they also had the license to make sharp criticisms of the habits of their subjects.”68 It is
no small wonder then that Wauchope himself often found poetry a malleable form as he sought to render his
perspectives to and address his readers. Such a use of texts also underscores a much more politicised
imperative to contest colonial hegemonies while ameliorating the marginalisations that Africans, both
Christianised and ‘traditional’, were meant to feel as colonial subjects that were consigned to the margins of
an increasingly hostile capitalist economy. The foregrounding of a racialised consciousness is one important
site from which Wauchope saw it important to inscribe himself into common identity and history with others.
Before signing off in “Inkosi Zakwa Xosa”, Wauchope reminded his readers that “we are of one nation,
brethren.”69

While the ideological valences that make such a turn to the past are plausible, it remains important to
acknowledge that the modern writer’s multiple inheritances meant that the influences that were brought to
bear on him, both African and European, formed part of an “intertextual dialogue” that was constitutive of his
sensibilities rather than extraneous to them.70 As we shall see with the poems that constitute Ingcamango
Ebuzimeni, where Wauchope’s meditations upon the need for faith to reinforce the spiritual certitudes of a
religious temperament amidst the vissiccitudes of a temporal, worldly existence, the Bible became an essential
reference point for the construction of textual meanings. Quotation assumed a significant position in as far as
the representation of biblical knowledge went. Considering “Akuko Nkanga Idubula Ingeti” (“The Ragwort
Never Blossoms but it Fades”), the first poem of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, the speaker purposefully quotes
Job from the Bible saying “Naked came I to the earth…naked shall I leave” 71 in order to pre-emptively mark
out the ephemerality of worldly trappings. As the proverbial title of the poem – which, when loosely translated
means “everyone may lose value” – indicates, “the projection of indigenous resources”72 was a salient feature

28
of Wauchope’s literary sensibilities. Drawing from western influences rendered the modern African poet one
whose literary repertoires were a fusion of “resources” of traditional African practices of orature that are so
often thought to be the retrogressive element that the modern African poet must shed before entering into the
‘light’ of literacy and its cultural exigencies.73 As Peterson has suggested, “it was through the processes of
language and signification that black writers created utterances of polyphony, disclaiming the racially
exclusive narratives of the ‘enlightenment’ and Empire and recasting them in order to allow for African
inscriptions into modernity.”74

We have already mentioned that one of the features of Wauchope’s investment in aesthetic practices is
predicated on his intent on finding in them an expression of his political ideals. This is, at least to me, a key
theme that needs to be explored further. It is also a question that resides beneath the surface of some of our
prior discussions. Perhaps this matter can be broached through a consideration of the conflation of generic
forms such as poetry and journalism. In the light of “Inkosi Zakwa Xosa”, Wauchope’s poem “Zimkile! Mfo
Wohlanga” seems to have been a way of not only ending his address but of also clinching his argument. The
question, then, is what is it that poetry as a form provided Wauchope with that journalistic prose per se could
not? I think that perhaps one way of exploring the issue is by considering poetry in itself, within the auspices
of the vernacular press, as a distinctive space of discourse. If, as we have mentioned before, the “tribal bard”,
as A.C. Jordan calls them, “was both a composer and public reciter”75 then the nature of his poetic utterance
can be taken to have a public prominence. The formal calling unto the direction of the utterance the reader’s
awareness, the form of poetry seems to be another way of ‘speaking’ publicly. The imaginative elicitation of
“the interactive character of public discourse” involves the use of forms that place the speaker and the hearer
in an “interactive social relation” that is “manifestly dialogic.”76 The interpelation between addressor and
addressee that is often dramatised in Wauchope’s poetry further involved the impelling of some sort of
response from the reader.
Wauchope’s penchant for intertextual reference can also have the effect of fixing texts with new meanings. In
the use of the notion of Imbumba yamanyama when Imbumba Yama Nyama was formed in 1882, Wauchope
and his peers had called upon the said last utterance of Ntsikana. As the story goes, when Ntsikana lay in his
death bed, “he instructed his followers to join the newly established mission at Chumie (Thyume) and to
remain united like the ball of scrapings from tanned hide, njenge mbumba yamanyama, which forms an
unbreakable mass when dry.”77 Two years after the formation of Imbumba Yama Nyama, Wauchope published
a poem suggestively entitled Imbumba Yamanyama. The poem follows thus:

29
The whole house wept and did not eat
The day that Ntsikana died.
He was buried and left there,
And we returned home.

White under the soil

Are the bones of the son of Gaba.
The grass has grown over the grave
Of the great hero of the nation.

But he still lives and speaks

His words of wisdom
Are sweet and beautiful;
He speaks of ‘Imbumba yamanyama’.

Wake up! stand up!

You people of Mbombo;
Pay attention to this word;
It is calling us to unity.

Wake up! stand up!

You people of Tugela;
You too share
In the misfortunes of Phalo’s house.

The wounds must heal,

Revenge and hatred pass.
We belong together, we are one;
We all speak the same tongue.

Christ alone died for us all;

We share the one inheritance in him.
Unity is strength

30
 For the Imbumba yamanyama.

Stir yourselves, don’t sleep

You black teachers.
We appeal to you at this time
When the nation has been scattered.

Unity can be found through education.

The Imbumba is calling you
Equip your children,
Prepare them for the struggle.78

As a poet whose imagination held at its embrace the nation as an imaginable entity, Wauchope looked to the
past for the images that would enable him to forge a common pattern of national unity through narrative.
Ntsikana, rendered into the present, is made to provide the discursive antecedents of Wauchope’s
contemporary concerns. The phrase ‘Imbumba Yamanyama’ signifies in a Janus-faced motion, looking to the
past, from whence Ntsikana’s exhortation came, while simultaneously turning to the present, where its
application serves as the inspiration of the organisation Imbumba Yama Nyama. The subtlety of Wauchope’s
use of this double signification doubtless owes itself to his attempts forge continuities between the past and the
present. The anteriority of Ntsikana’s deliberation (“He speaks of ‘Imbumba yamanyama’”) is later
transformed, in the poem, into the nationalistic rallies of Imbumba Yama Nyama (“The Imbumba is calling
you) in a metonymic repetition of the phrase to signify distinct yet related epochs and positionalities. The
discursive power of the poem lies, then, in its emplacement of its objectives – and, by extension, those of
Imbumba Yamanyama - as the actualised response to Ntsikana’s call for ‘Imbumba yamanyama’. At the
interceptions of history, it would seem that it is Ntsikana’s voice that thus persists in Wauchope’s present
(“But he still lives and speaks/ His words of wisdom”), as well as its capacity to address a distinct reading
collectivity; a black public. It is a fascinating initiation of simultaneities: on the one hand the poem
presupposes itself as disseminating a discourse of unity that was signalled by Ntsikana yet, by its appearance,
it inscribes its own agenda of nationalist organisation and the undertaking of initiatives of Imbumba Yama
Nyama. These related temporalities of the past and present, furthermore, relate to the necessity to realise work
for future development. Hence, the past and present form gathering points for the undertaking of a project
(“Prepare for the struggle”) that, it seems, will be initiated from within the sinews of modernity: “Unity can be

31
found through education/ The Imbumba is calling you/ Equip your children,/ Prepare them for the struggle”.
From this vantage, Ntsikana seems to be suddenly catapulted into the midst of a conflicted modernity whose
struggle he has prognosed.

Poetic form for Wauchope was not only an incitation to reading for-itself but rather a form employed in order
to involve his readers in a culture of social and political organisation and action beyond the pages of the
newspapers that his writings were to be read in. “Imbumba yamanyama” presents us with an understanding of
the way in which Wauchope saw in the pursuit of European modernity and its social and intellectual offerings
(namely education) by Africans as a way of entering into “the struggle.” This conception of education as
enabling the struggle for united Africans signifies how, for Christian Africans, modernity was never a fulfilled
state. Indeed, it often had the resultant effect of spawning its own problems. For Africans participating in some
its social formations entailed existing in antagonism with the very political order that they prised as part their
own acquired identities. In the following section of this chapter I shall turn to a consideration of how self-
inscription and some discursive aspects of praise poetry formed an important part of Wauchope’s writing.

On the Threshold of ‘Obscurity and Exegesis’: Praising and Naming

It is interesting that, in many of Wauchope’s writings, carving out the identity of a particular person and
addressing him was tantamount to ‘praising’ him. The writing of “memorised poetry” (see below), of course,
meant that the addressee had recourse to a store of knowledge that would enable him/her to decipher the
references contained in the ‘praise’. This particular process of individuation seemed to present itself handily to
Wauchope as he sought to address himself to particular issues and persons. In “ITwenty-Four”, an article that
expresses “concern about the divisions in the United Methodist Church”, he addresses Williams Kobe
Ntsikana thus:

Peace, William, son of Ntsikana! Is it even you who is destroying your own people’s house?
Peace Cirha! Peace, my brother/father-in-law, son of Ranuga, grandson of Yeye! Peace
mNkabane. Ndlabela; peace, Mqocwa! Peace my father’s son, you of the cattle of Chizama, son
of Hloyi, of Malahlanothuthu; peace Cethe! Peace Frank, grandson of Neku, the illustrious
ancestor of our nation. If this was a stick fight, you would look up now, and one would ask who
uttered these words that sounds like it is one from the house of

32
 Silwangangubo
Siphunzi, the stump that scares me
Odours of hyena

Yes it is I of Milkwood trees at Xhokwane, son of DYOBA-WODAKA.79

What interests me here as much as what Wauchope is saying are the poetic conventions that he employs in
order to identify himself. Indeed, how is one to decipher that the author of these words is Isaac Wauchope?
This is a question that we raised at the beginning of this chapter. Again, I conjecture that it is in the demand
for exegesis that the discursive procedures of the form that has been used that can enable us to throw some sort
of light on the matter. Where Wauchope states that it is he, “Silwangangubo/ Siphunzi, the stump that scares
me/ Odours of hyena,”80 he is drawing this part of his self-identificatory statement from his clan praises. It
must be remembered the ‘archive’ of memorised poetry – that is, clan praises that have been composed often
generations before the utterer’s recitation and form a tradition of intertextual references - places as a condition
of decipherability the possibility that the intended reader will be versed in “the prevailing and culturally
established modes of interpretation of that utterance.”81 By memorised poetry, it is meant that one “learns a
poem by heart; whenever [the reciter] performs, the poem is repeated with – if any – verbal alterations.”82
That, by conventional means, Wauchope has withheld his own name and placed his identity within a larger
sphere of ancestral history through his ‘quotation’ from memorised praises means that the addressee has been
drawn into “specific kinds of hermeneutic activity”83 where his knowledge, or the lack thereof, would consign
him to the plane of exegesis or the depths of obscurity. Granted, what would seem interesting, then, is that
having identified only one person (Willam Kobe Ntsikana) as the addressee, Wauchope has presupposed the
hearer’s ‘inside’ relation to the clan names being written. Needless to say, this peculiar use of names presents
to us another paradox. Why, for instance, did Wauchope not resolve to retain the forthright reference of his
Christian name but, instead, delved into the complex and variable ‘archive’ of clan names? We have already
mentioned Wauchope’s predilection for polyphonic texts. Given the tendency of ‘praises’ to provide “a link
[between the subject and] his or her community, lineage and origins,”84 this bent towards naming would seem
to place the speaker and the hearer in a much larger sphere of historical consciousness and interaction than a
proper name and surname could provide. What belies such an orientation in self-identification is the dense
universe of historical, cultural and literary knowledges that “can only be deciphered by a listener who is
already in possession of every detail”85 of the workings of the conventions used within a genre. That the
conventions that govern such an understanding of the speaker’s identity lies beyond the text in a sphere of
33
social relations that the addressor and addressee must be acquainted with is an important indicator that texts
within the public sphere created by the vernacular newspapers in the Cape colony did not simply foster
“relations amongst strangers.”86 Rather, the “smaller circle[s]” of textual interaction exemplified by such use
of generic modes of address suggests “deeply sedimented personalised uses of print”87 where readers are likely
to be socially connected to writers in specific and significant ways.

As we have begun to suggest, the Xhosa tradition of praise poetry consists of both memorised and improvised
poetry.88 There are numerous praise poems that belong to the latter category that Wauchope wrote and
published. Early on in the life of Imvo Zabantsundu, Wauchope felt compelled to ‘praise’ its editor John
Tengo Jabavu, whom he saw as comparable to “the wife of Naphakade, the son of Brownlee, when that great
woman had to wake up to cook lots of porridge for the refugees of the Mhlakaza and Nongqawuse disasters.”89
In the praise poem, he saw Jabavu as

Live coals ash covered

Don’t step on them, they will burn you
Whether a Magistrate, whether a Doctor
He’ll be handled by the great Jabavu.

He is the horn of a rhino,

He is the one that thrashes empty corn heads
Until he fills a basket,
He who leans against the lady’s mountain.

The old bone so often knocked on a rock for its Murrow,

He whose voice is known to the late Sobantu,
He who is known even in Cape Town
By the likes of de Waal and Sauer.90

The poem, in its rich allusiveness, illuminates the character of Jabavu, his fearlessness and tirelessness in Cape
politics. Ever cognizant of the praise poet’s penchant for composing a “cluster” of “praises” that “mark and
identify a person,”91 Wauchope delves into aspects of the life story of Jabavu, drawing out the incidents that
mark his character out for its prominence. The persona of the praise poet in the annals of the vernacular press

34
thus conflated writing (literacy) and ‘speaking’ (orature) in innovative ways that held the inheritances of the
past while keeping cognizant of the need to reinvigorate these forms in a new context that allowed the reach of
publics that were a dispersed entity united, by the act of reading texts and the social world which they sought
to signify upon.

In the beginning of this chapter, we observed what then seemed to be a perplexing feature of Wauchope’s
writing: the styling of authorial identity. Turning to this point, I would like to discuss how this aspect of
writing related to his African audience in a very intimate and particular way. Wauchope’s multifaceted
identity can be gleaned through the various ways in which he presented himself through nomenclature. In his
insightful study, The Life and Work of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, Nyamende has observed that Wauchope
used many pseudonyms in order to “form up a catalogue of names.”92 An admiring correspondent in Imvo
Zabantsundu was rather smitten by Wauchope’s elusive use of proper names. Lauding Wauchope, he begins
by saying that “he uses the quality of Xhosa that was last experienced in the times of Tiyo Soga and William
Gqoba. They [readers of Imvo Zabantsundu] note that Ngingi is quite familiar with the discussions of the
leading men of this land who probe deeply into the affairs affecting the people’s lives, and it is also evident
that he possesses the talent of a praise poet.”93 The correspondent ends off by underlining the perplexing name
by which the subject of his article, “Ngingi Dyoba wodaka”, goes by. Once more, referring the matter to the
confusion of the readers of the newspaper, he states that “They then conclude by wondering what this Ngingi
Dyoba-wodaka’s real name might be; they are not quite familiar with the one he now uses. We may never
know, perhaps they could get yet another name from Ngingi, who is said to be rich in names. I just wonder
now who told them all that.”94 “Dyoba wodaka” was, of course, a reference to William Wauchope; the African
name of Wauchope’s father. Once more, that any claim to the identification of the author’s identity should
incorporate an acquaintance with his ancestral history is a reminder of the extent to which Wauchope moved
beyond the reach of his own given identity in order to identify himself. This similarly drew his possible
readers into a similar field of knowledge. It is not surprising that the plethora of names under whose guise
Wauchope often wrote should reflect the range of contexts and purposes for which he engaged in writing. In
his research into Wauchope’s “life and work,” Nyamende penned the plenitude names thus:

Isaac
[Yisake] (as he calls his uncle)
William

35
 Isaac Williams (registered name in Lovedale)
Isaac Williams Wauchope
Isaac Wauchope
IW
IWW
I W W Citashe
Isaac Wauchope Dyoba (by Jacob Bam)
Wauchope
I Wauchope
Umfo kaDyobha (the Xhosa people generally)
Dyoba wodaka
Dyoba (later writers)
Nginginya
Ngingi
Ngingi Dyobudaka
Ngingi Dyoba
Silwangangubo
Silwangangubo-nye
95
Mngcangatelo.

The names themselves were drawn from different contexts and, in their specific use, could supplement the
guise under which Wauchope had chosen to write. In a series of articles on “Primitive Native Customs” that
he published in Imvo Zabantsundu, he signed himself off as “Rev. I Wauchope, Native Minister” while in The
Natives and their Missionaries he simply referred to himself simply as “I.W.”. In the aforementioned article
“Inkosi Zakwa Xosa” he gave his name as “I.W.W. Citashe”. The appendage of his (paternal) grandfather’s
name to an article whose intent was to encourage a sense of political responsiveness among his readers that
was directly informed by the courageous exploits of their forefathers is interesting. Citashe himself was known
to have fought in the battle of Amalinde “where he had sustained a serious injury: the broken point of a
wooden assegai lodged in his jaw wounding his left eye.”96 Such a show of courage serves as an example of
the character that Wauchope found to be wanting in the men of his generation. It would seem, therefore, that
the various names that Wauchope chose to proffer in reference to himself are to be read as appendages to the
particular texts that they were associated with. This, I think, can be one way of reading the styling of authorial
identity as textually leaden. M. Pelem’s complaint that Wauchope “does not know even his own name” could

36
thus be inverted and read into a gnostic, intentional template of multi-contextual self-referentiality. In other
words, the names could be read as markers of the various subject positions that Wauchope could be seen
taking up and foregrounding in particular instances. This remains, however, an essentially speculative thesis
for there isn’t much evidence to support the notion that the reading practices of Wauchope’s peers placed them
in a position to decipher such a complex arrangement of self-inscription.

* * *

In this chapter I have sought to explore the various ways in which writing, as a cultural and political practice,
featured in the life of Isaac Wauchope. While it is clear that writing formed a significant element of the
cultural life of Christianised Africans in the eastern Cape colony, one of the notable developments that the
vernacular press enabled was the space for the articulation of ‘native opinion’. An African public sphere
among Christianised Africans brought them closer not only to each other in their common struggles but
permitted their reflection on cultural and political life that, though steeped in the influences of European
modernity, nevertheless saw them considering traditional influences as a living part of their cultural identity.
Wauchope’s concern with Xhosa potentates as figure heads of the Xhosa nation provided much purview to
pontificate nationalist sentiments and further advance the cause for the franchise for Africans. That Wauchope
further saw the need for a pan-ethnic nationalism among Africans in South Africa was a measure of the extent
to which race had become an important site of political and cultural struggle. The life of Wauchope was
eventful and presented our subject with a great deal of travail. In the following chapter we shall turn to
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, a series of poems that he wrote while he was in prison. As the “difficult
years” (imprisonment)97 of his life wore on, Wauchope’s meditations found expression solely in poetry. These
poems in their subdued presentation, once more compel their readers to look beyond them while at the same
time trying to understand the poems for their presentation of their author’s thoughts and feelings.

37
Notes to Chapter One

38
1
Imvo Zabantsundu, February 1912, p. 6.
2
Ibid.
3
Wauchope quoted in Nyamende, M.A., The Life and Works of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, p. 416.
4
Barber, K., “Obscurity and Exegesis in African Oral Praise Poetry” in Duncan Brown (editor) Oral Literature and
Performance in Southern Africa, (Oxford/Cape Town/Athens: James Currey/David Philip/Ohio University Press, 1999),
p. 29.
5
Peterson, B., “The Bantu World and the World of the Book: Reading, Writing, and “Enlightenment” ” in Karin Barber
(editor) Africa’s hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006), p. 236.
6
Hofmeyr, I., “We Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told”: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom,
(Portsmouth/Johannesburg/London: Heinemann/Witwatersrand University Press/James Currey, 1993), p. 9.
7
Attwell, Rewriting modernity, p. 5.
8
Ntantala, P., A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phylis Ntantala, ( Cape Town: David Philip, 1992), p. 109.
9
Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, p. 5.
10
See “Introduction” above, p. 5.
11
Peterson, “The Bantu World”, p. 252.
12
Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk, (New York: Banta Books, 1989), p. 3
13
Jabavu, J.T., “The Launch” in Mothobi Mutloatse (editor ) Reconstruction: 90 Years of Black Historical Literature
(Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1981), p. 103.
14
Ibid., p. 102.
15
Ibid., p. 103.
16
SeeClarke, R., Book Frontiers, Chapter 1.
17
Opland, J., “The transition from Oral to Written Literature in Xhosa”, p. 136.
18
Opland, J., Xhosa Poets and Poetry, p. 242.
19
Jordan, A.C., Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), p. 89.
20
Ibid.
21
Mqhayi quoted in Jordan, Towards, p. 27.
22
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 124.
23
Ibid., pp. 124-125.
24
Sartre, J.P., What is Literature, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 52.
25
Ibid., p. 53.
26
Wauchope, I., Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, November 1882, p. 4.
27
Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, p. 8.
28
Wauchope, I., Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, November 1882, p. 4.
29
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 107.
30
Ibid., p. 101.
31
Nyamende, The Life and Works, pp. 127-128.
32
Peires, J., The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence, (Johannesburg/Cape
Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1981), p. 68.
33
See Hodgson, J., “Fluid assets and fixed investments: 160 years of the Ntsikana tradition” in Richard Whitaker and
Edgard Sienaert (editors) Oral Tradition and Literacy, (Durban: Natal University Oral Documentation and Reserch
Centre, 1986), p. 191.
34
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 128.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., p. 135.
38
Ibid., p. 136.
39
Thompson, T.J., Touching the Heart: Xhosa Missionaries to Malawi 1876 – 1888, (Pretoria: University of South
Africa, 2000), p. 169.
40
Ibid.
41
See Hofmeyr, I., “Reading Debating/Debating Reading: The Case of the Lovedale Literary Society, or Why Mandela
Quotes Shakespeare” in Karin Barber (editor) Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
42
Thompson, Touching the Heart, p. 166.
43
Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, p. 17.
44
Thompson, Touching the Heart, p. 167.
45
Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, p. 13.
46
Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals, p. 5.
47
Imvo Zabantsundu, 11 May, 1885.
48
Ibid.
49
Wauchope, The Natives, p. 16.
50
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 141.
51
Imvo Zabantsundu, 3rd March, 1892, p. 3.
52
Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, p. 30.
53
Izwi Labantu quoted in Odendaal Vukani Bantu!, p. 153.
54
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 152.
55
Ibid., p. 148.
56
Thompson, Touching the Heart, p. 189.
57
Mqhayi, S.E.K., “The Sinking of the Mendi” in Jack Cope and Uys Krige (editors) The Penguin Book of South African
Verse, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 279.
58
See “Introduction” above, p. 5.
59
Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, June 1882, p.1.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
63
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 86.
64
Gilroy, P., The Black Atlantic, pp. 38-39.
65
Peterson, B., “Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Melancholy Narratives, Petitions and the Ethics of
Suffering”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (forthcoming), March 2008, p. 10.
66
Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals, p. 99.
67
Jordan, Towards an African Literature, p. 27.
68
Ibid., p. 26.
69
Wauchope, I. Isigidimi Sama-Xosa, 1882.
70
See Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries and African Intellectuals, Chapter 4.
71
Wauchope, I., Imvo Zabantsunsu, 1912.
72
Quayson, A., Strategic Transformations in Negerian Writing: Rev Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Ben
Okri, (Oxford/Bloomington: James Currey Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 18.
73
See Gates H.L., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes” in “Race”, Writing and Difference, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986).
74
Peterson, “Sol Plaatje’s Native Life”, pp. 6-7.
75
Jordan, Towards an African Literature, p. 21.
76
Warner, M., “Publics and Counterpublics” in Public Culture, 14(1), 2002, p. 63.
77
Hodgson, J., “Fluid Assets and Fixed Investments”, p. 191.
78
Wauchope quoted in Thompson, Touching the Heart, pp. 195-196.
79
Wauchope quoted in Nyamande, The Life and Works, p. 344.
80
Ibid.
81
Barber, “Obscurity and Exegesis”, p. 28.
82
Opland, Xhosa Poets and Poetry, p. 11.
83
Ibid.
84
Gunner, L., and Gwala, M.P. (editors), Musho! Zulu Popular Praises, (East Lansing: Michigan University Press,
1991), p. 4.
85
Barber, “Obscurity and Exegesis”, p. 44.
86
Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics” in Public Culture 14(1), 2002, pp. 55-57.
87
Barber, K., “Audiences and the Book in Africa” in Current Writing, p. 16.
88
See Opland, Xhosa Poets and Poetry and Nyamende, The Life and Works.
89
Wauchope quoted in Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 348.
90
Ibid.
91
Gunner and Gwala, Musho!, p. 4.
92
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 150.
93
Quoted in Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 149.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid, pp. 153-154.
96
Ibid, pp. 127-128.
97
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 145.
 Chapter Two

Ingcamango Ebunzimeni: The Difficult Years and the Quest for Redemption

This chapter explores Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. The events leading up to and ensuing the publication of the
poems are revealing for they illuminate the trying circumstances in which the poems were written. The
incarceration of Wauchope, an African minister, was a matter of great public interest for Africans and
Europeans alike. Though the poems that constitute Ingcamango Ebunzimeni do not make direct reference to
this what is of interest to us is how in the midst of his being lain as an outcast and excommunicated from the
church, he invigorated his Christianity. Wauchope’s complex interpretation of the significance of Christianity
as a force in the modernisation of Africans is rendered in The Natives and their Missionaries, his only tract
which was published in his ill-fated year of 1908. The Natives and their Missionaries provided, from
Wauchope’s point of view, a defence of the Christianisation of Africans. In the midst of the contradictions that
Africans like Wauchope were to experience and live through in the colonial order that was his milieu,
Christianity became, as I argue about Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, a way of reclaiming the promises that
modernisation offered but always fell short of.

Isaac Wauchope’s The Natives and their Missionaries

Thus far we have explored the writings of Wauchope in relation to his social and political exploits. It would be
appropriate now to turn to another aspect of his identity as expressed in his writings: his Christian identity and
its relation to African history and culture. As an African and minister of the Free Church of Scotland,
Wauchope was compelled to carve out and throw asunder the many things of traditional African social and
spiritual existence that were “repugnant to the Christian sense.”1 Yet what is compelling about his writings is
his insistent concern for an understanding of the mores and social norms of the so-called red/ochre African
within the analytical frameworks of the rationalism and ethics of European modernity. In a series of articles
that were published under the collective title “Primitive Native Customs” that he wrote under the name “Rev.
I. Wauchope, Native Minister” his discussion of the stated theme was informed by a sense that “All national
customs are founded upon some real or supposed moral ideas, and are the result of the human mind’s search
after the greatest good.”2 Wauchope refused to usher his examination of ‘primitive native customs’ under the
typical colonial dyadic that denies the social practices of ‘natives’ from their operations as the resultants of the

42
work of ideas (“the result of the human mind’s search”). This often meant that his own conception of
‘enlightenment’ worked through a temporal template that did not necessarily function as if initiated solely
through the presence of Europeans among the ‘natives’. In order to combine his critique of ethics with a
historical narrative that could encompass the complex legacies, both traditional and modern, of Africans,
Wauchope employed strategies of narration and representation that were, typical of him, a combination of
genres and perspectives. In this section of this chapter, we shall turn predominantly to his only published tract,
The Natives and their Missionaries.

The basic premise upon which The Natives and their Missionaries was written was to provide a historical
defence of the missionary endeavour among the Africans of the eastern Cape colony. The narrative thrust of
the tract hinged upon rendering an evidential account of the presence of missionaries among the Xhosa. The
thesis provided by Wauchope is one that states that “the missionaries were instrumental in the transformation
of the black people from what the Dutch colonists saw merely as “schepselen” to human beings with dignity,
commanding respect.”3 However, as the tract is provided with historical and social antecedents of African
social existence and, importantly the ethics underlying it, Wauchope is careful not to overlook African life
before the arrival of the missionaries as simply aberrations that were to be transmuted in a teleological
effusion from the ‘darkness’ of savagery to the ‘light’ of civilisation through the agency of white patronages.
Of course, conventional evangelic depictions of autochthonous African societies rested upon their
“conceptions of relative human worth” where African culture was “degenerate, showing the lot of common
mankind without Christianity.”4 From this perspective, the evocation of any narrative of evangelism would
envision the ‘upliftment’ of Africans from a ‘degenerate’ existence to one that was closer to European senses
of ‘civilisation’. The thesis developed by Wauchope in The Natives and their Missionaries seems all the more
intriguing because it does accept such a progression as a figure of historical development for Africans. The
historical anecdotes that are scattered throughout The Natives and their Missionaries are supplemented with
observations that cement his perspective. Towards the end of the tract, Wauchope pauses to reflect:

From 1820 to 1908 the Missionaries have been hard at work. The question is – What have they
achieved? I answer the question by another. What has been achieved for the temporal and
spiritual good of the native races, morally, educationally and socially in the realization of which
the missionary has not been a factor, an important factor, if not the prime mover? They have
transformed our race. If our fathers who fell at Amalinde were to rise and see their children, they
would not know us. Even the reds of to-day are different from the reds of those days, and while

43
 many of us deplore the subversion of many native institutions that were of service in keeping us
together socially and politically, no man of sense can say we would have done better without the
missionaries.5

The comparative articulations found above are typical of the general pattern of the tract itself. In this section, I
am primarily interested in how Wauchope sought to portray ‘native life’ before the missionaries came forth, in
spite of his commonplace acceptance of the essential good that he sees the missionaries to have brought to
Africans, The Natives and their Missionaries provides some subversions of the conventional, linear narrative
of the ‘civilisation of natives’ that are worth regarding.

In order to chart a picture of the terrain that the missionaries found their evangelical ‘mission’ to be carried out
in, Wauchope reminds his readers to “borne in mind” that the “country was in [a] disturbed state when the first
Missionaries appeared” because of the “system of warfare [that] became established…between the then
Colonists and the Natives”6 in the preceding years. It is within the context of this conflicted history that
Wauchope endeavours to ask the question “what was the state of Kafirland when the Missionaries came?”
When the London Missionary Society, under the secretary-ship of Rev. John Love, sent Dr. Johannes T. van
der Kemp to South Africa in 1799,7 he and his successors were to find that “instead of a shifty, nomadic race
the Natives had settled homes and settled institutions. There were the Chiefs and their Councillors, who
represented Law and Order, and administered law based on equitable principles.”8 Rather than a system of
discontinuous practices, retrogressive compared to European norms, Wauchope is more keenly aware of the
commonalities shared between the ‘natives’ and their European counterparts:

They [missionaries] found existing in the heathen society a complete system of ethics – a kind of
hard shell or crust enveloping the ethical life of the people just as in a nut the kernel is protected
by the shell. There was much that harmonised with Christian ethics; there were also many things
which were repugnant to the Christian sense. Could the whole structure be pulled down and new
one set up, or was there room for wise discrimination? That was the problem the Missionary had
to solve. Has this problem been solved yet? is a question one might well ask. I venture to answer
that an attempt at a solution of the difficulty which aimed at discarding the structure and replacing
it by a new has proved a failure, as witnessed by the state of the present Native Christian
generation, which has lost the good things their fathers had, but has not taken easily to the new.9

44
The underlying paradox lurking beneath such an interpretation of ‘native life’ is an ambivalence towards what
V.Y. Mudimbe refers to as “the colonising structure” which involves as one of its hypotheses the moral
imperative of the “domestication” and “reformation of native’s minds.”10 By yearning for some sort of middle-
ground, Wauchope refutes the oft proclaimed essential difference between Africans and Europeans which
often sees the former being passed of as signifying lack and absence. Instead, Wauchope begins to strongly
articulate how, in the search for his new identity, the Christian African’s modernity would have to be a
harmonised compendium of both European and African influences. That Wauchope therefore committed
himself to reflecting on ‘primitive native customs’ is indicative of his quest to find an understanding of a
rational organisation of traditional society. In a similar vein, the articles written under the name “Primitive
Native Customs” seek for an understanding of the rational basis upon which the customs of traditional Xhosa
society are predicated. In his discussion of “The Lobola”, for instance, Wauchope explains that ‘The Lobolo’
is a marital custom where “cattle are given as dowry…as a compensation to the parents for the loss of the
services of their daughter.” 11 He further suggests that “the ethical significance of the custom as generally
practiced is”, first of all, that it “preserves “the social dignity of the wife.” It also “Provides a guarantee for the
good treatment of the wife by her husband and her people [,] It forms a safeguard against immoral conduct and
is an encouragement to charity – a source of material benefit to parents [and, lastly] encourages industry, as
the lazy man would have no wife, because he would have no cattle unless he worked.”12 Reflecting on the
Christian Church’s prohibition of the custom, Wauchope went on to suggest that what the African on the
crossroads between tradition and ‘civilisation’ needed was “not stringent prohibition of laws, but regulative
laws by which the good that is in their customs could be retained, while the bad is rejected.”13

One significant interpretive and methodological tool that is used in The Natives and their Missionaries is that
of translation. What is interesting about the evocation of translation as a tool of cross-cultural understanding is
its tendency towards a fissuring of the hermetic spaces from which cultural particularity might be read. The
pairing of ideas (in this case African and European) for comparison that translation invites is particularly
useful. Wauchope muses that “the word ‘custom’ is the nearest translation of the word Isiko. But the two
words do not mean the same thing in their origin. Custom, I believe, is a French word derived from the Latin
‘Consuetudo’, and means that which is done every day, common use, and comes to be applied to buying
regularly from the same shop, and in the plural, to a tax on goods. And on the other hand, the word Isiko is
derived from the verb Ukusika, to cut, and means ‘that which has been cut out by long usage as most equitable
and rational.” It is quite clear that, founded on such principles, “Native laws were readily obeyed and

45
respected.”14 In spite of his use of analytical rubrics that tend to coerce European and African practices into
comparable formations, Wauchope still saw the “new community” of Africans as “semi-civilised” or “in the
transition stage” because their “evolutionary progress, which is the sine qua non of all real progress, has
become stunted…” because “natives generally lacked” industry, or, did not embrace “industry as a rule to
life.”15 The judgement pronounced here serves to underline that it is the African’s attitude toward work that
has kept him from attaining the degree of advancement that is fit for a ‘civilised’ life. “Let me not be
understood as saying that Natives will not work,” he avers. “What I say is, work to us is not a rule of life. We
are quite willing to work but it must be for a limited time and for a specified object, maybe the purchasing of
clothes, or a cow, or a wife, and when that object is gained we retire to rest.”16 Of course, the transformation of
such a temperament is something that is attributable to the labour of “the Missionaries and their friends”
among “the native races of South Africa.”17 As we have already suggested, much of the rest of the tract is
concerned with delineating a history of the trials and developments of missionary labour among the Xhosa.
The Natives and their Missionaries is, then, a work that, though exploratory of themes around evangelism and
the Christianisation of Africans, remains preoccupied with simultaneously articulating the similitudes and
differences between Europeans and Africans. That the difference is contingent and not essential bares record
to what Wauchope must have thought to be the attainability of ‘civilisation’ through industry. That to
Wauchope ‘civilisation’ could not be sought simply in a Eurocentric self-stylisation meant that the past would
continue to serve as a source of knowledge and identity for Christian Africans.

* * *

The period marked by the turn of the twentieth century is defined in the social life of Isaac Wauchope by a
growing concern for the provision of higher education for Africans. For the years that drew up to the
unification of South Africa, “the idea of setting up a college of higher education for black students which
would operate across the whole of South Africa”18 was met with enthusiasm by a considerable number of
Christian Africans, both male and female. Wauchope was an active and involved member of The Inter-State
College Scheme, “travelling around the Cape, speaking at meetings and drumming up support – both
theoretical and financial – for the scheme,” even at financial expense to himself.19 Upon learning that the
government of the Cape colony had agreed to support the scheme provided that Africans could raise an
amount of 25 000 pounds, Wauchope responded enthusiastically that this was “ ‘good news’. Glorious news. I
feel our work is really beginning now. Now is the time to renew our energies and move about holding

46
meetings and stirring up the people to pay up.”20 The labours of many of the scheme would come to fruition
when, early in February 1916, “a vast concourse of people, both white and black and of every nationality had
gathered on the historic site of College, Fort Hare, near Alice.”21 Imvo Zabantsundu reported that while the
occasion was “a day of small things [to whites] …To a native … this was a day of great things.”22 The South
African Native College would, of course, subsequently come to be known as the University of Fort Hare, an
instrumental institution in the education of Africans in the twentieth century. The article does not mention
Wauchope’s presence at the celebrations at Fort Hare. Nor does the optimism and fulfilment of the mentioned
years portent that the intervening years were arguably some of the most difficult of Wauchope’s life. By the
time Imvo Zabantsundu would report of Wauchope’s second marriage in 1913, the poignant events leading up
to that point hurled him into a trial of fraud in which he was convicted, spent two years in prison,
excommunicated from the church, lost his possessions, and left his children virtually ‘orphans’ as his first wife
Naniwe died in 1911.

The descending twist of fortune occasioned by Wauchope’s imprisonment make for a complex interface
between his life and literary creativity. The events and writings that form the subject of this chapter are a
peculiar fit in his biography. This is because they place into a maze of obscurity and scant knowledge the days
of one whose public prominence could be measured by the regularity with which he contributed to the
newspapers of ‘native opinion’ at the time. Disgraced as a “masquerading minister,” by the time he would be
released from prison he, felt that he was “no longer a complete person.”23 The poems that appeared soon after
the event of Wauchope’s release from prison (Ingcamango Ebunzimeni) revealed, in their thematic concerns
and tendency toward a contemplation of moral considerations, their authors’ deep Christian, religious
sentiments, and a perplexing quest for salvation. Given that the colonial judicial system remained
unsympathetic towards him in the course of his trial, Wauchope’s contemplation of his Christian identity as
both a marker of African modernity and spiritual salvation in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni seems to have been a
personal sojourn. The poems marked a cornerstone belief acquired by Africans from the sinews of the same
colonial modernity that set his life into a misery, that saw him, in the opinion of white officials and
commentators, as an unbecoming example of a ‘civilised’ African. At the heart of the interface that we have
gleaned to be present between Wauchope’s biography and Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, there seems to be a
profound anxiety that Europeans felt towards Africans that they had produced as modern, civilised subjects.
The resonances with his life story that could be inferred in the strong bent towards redemption in the poems
are marked by the oft projected generality of the poems. Scholars have similarly remarked on the difficulty of

47
reading Ingcamango Ebunzimeni simply as a personal testament. In a brief critique of the poems that he gave,
Nyamende felt that they conveyed “profound ideas and obscure meanings” because the poet does not unravel
“the cause of his feelings.”24 What seems characteristic of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni is the extent to which
poetry seemed, once more, to be an indispensable form for Wauchope’s contemplation of the travails that had
thrown him into difficult times.

“The Ignominous Shame of a ‘Masquerading Minister’”25

When the twentieth century came to a beginning, Isaac Wauchope had worked as a missionary for almost a
decade. In 1905, Sarah Tshona, a parishioner of his, died.26 In the while before her death, Wauchope had taken
on the responsibilities of minding her estate. In the event of her death, a will was said to have been made of
which “he was executor, which left most of her land and property to her second son, rather than the first.”27
Suspicious of the “authenticity of this will”, the family filed suit and in 1907, Wauchope was drawn into a
lengthy civil case. He was represented by James Rose-Innes, a liberal who had sympathies towards Africans
and was a close friend of Jabavu and his family.28

Scholars writing on the trial and imprisonment of Wauchope have been mindful that public opinion and the
judicial system were not uninhibited by racial prejudices throughout the course of the trial. T. Jack Thompson
has observed that “the case aroused a large amount of public interest, which tended to divide along racial
lines.”29 In his own biographical work, Nyamende remained unconvinced that the case was not “just a way to
silence one of the most outspoken voices and a defender of human rights….It could easily have been a
sophisticated trap laid for Wauchope.”30 In his Imvo Zabantsundu, John Tengo Jabavu, a long time friend and
colleague of Wauchope, gave his confidence in the latter’s innocence and stated his reservations about the
impartiality of the colonial judiciary. In an editorial written early in 1910, around the time of Wauchope’s
conviction, he expressed no doubt that

what he did, which got him into his present trouble, was solely for the good and in the service
of…his people…Had he been tried by a jury of his peers these considerations would no doubt
have weighed greatly in his favour and there would have been no doubt about the result. In the
circumstances the result was inevitable and in durance vile he must console himself with the
thought that the sympathy of his people is with him. His family and relatives must likewise
console themselves.31

48
While there was no consummate evidence to maintain that Wauchope reaped any benefits from his execution
of the will, a correspondent in the Alice Times was less sympathetic. It began by noting that “Isaac Wauchope,
a native clergyman, was sentenced at Grahamstown the other day to three years’ imprisonment with hard
labour for having forged a will.”32 Turning to Imvo Zabantsundu’s defence of Wauchope, it began by
reflecting that

the leading South African native newspaper…holds him a martyr…In other words, the native
paper contends that having had special trust imposed in him owing to his position and having
abused that confidence, Isaac Wauchope is justified, because, in Imvo’s words, he was “a patriot
and enthusiastic promoter of everything that was for the good of his people”. No wonder if these
are the kind of sentiments which are encouraged by the leading native newspaper in [the] Cape
Colony that people are doubtful how far to trust the educated natives.33

Unmoved by any claims to Wauchope’s innocence, the correspondent further concluded that

If every felon who has justly got his deserts is to have the sympathy of his people, theft, forgery
and fraud are likely to increase. Imvo’s paragraph speaks for itself; but there is just this to be said,
that it does not really express the true feelings of the more respectable natives, who are not the
devoted admirers of criminals they are here made out to be.34

Wauchope was found guilty and sentenced within thirty minutes by the white jury that presided over the trial.35
The judges, Kotze and Shiclin, annulled the will that had led to the case. In their comments about Wauchope,
they felt that “from a high press point of view and the higher interest of the public it is our duty to suggest
further that unless the defendant succeeds in clearing himself from this stigma, it is the duty of the Church in
which he belongs to disrobe him of his clerical vestments as it is preposterous to permit a man with charge of
such gravity resting upon him to be masquerading as a minister.”36 An article published in Imvo Zabantsundu
would follow in a similar suit, loath of the “brazen manner in which this Masquerading Minister bluffed and
bounced through one Court into another [which, the correspondent saw as] stamp[ing] him as an ecclesiastical
pirate of the worst type.”37 Wauchope protested for his innocence, although he admitted that the controversy
over the will of Mrs Tshona’s was “grievous fault” that had plunged his church into “disgrace.”38
Excommunicated from the church and regarded as a criminal by white observers, Wauchope was to begin

49
serving his term at Tokai Convict Station as a disgraced man whose days had worn to fifty seven years. He
began serving his term early in 1910.

‘Carrying the Cross’: Ingcamango Ebunzimeni

The correspondences written by Wauchope while he was in prison do not indicate that at the time he was held
at Tokai he had begun to labour towards writings that would serve as thoughts borne in his place of
“hardships.” In a letter written to Imvo Zabantsundu published in July 1911 he expressed his regret that “costs
to cover this case left me without even a chicken, as they soared up to four hundred pounds, and I had to sell
all the stock I had in my possession.”39 Nevertheless, that his thoughts had turned towards an austere
contemplation of the strength that his Christian faith could provide him is already evident here: “I only hope
my soul will remain hidden under the cross of Jesus so that it can be redeemed to live eternally. I am thus at
His feet day and night. That is all the peace I have got. Jesus is my strength, I am holding onto him. May my
father who is your Father do all He can to get me out of this difficulty.”40 The quest for redemption and solace
in Christ is a major theme in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. In “Akuko Nkanga Idubula Ingeti” (The Ragwort
Never Blossoms but it Fades)41 the speaker muses “Inye into ema imi/ Kukutwala Umnqmlezo/ Kukukolwa e
Nkosini;/ Kukufela inyaniso” (Only one thing does not change/ It is carrying the Cross/ Is believing in the
Lord/ Is dying for the Truth). As we have already suggested in the first chapter, the appearance of Ingcamango
Ebunzimeni was a rather unannounced and subdued affair. Devoid of the prose that so often accompanied his
poetry before, these poems appear as if they were meditations spawned in a melancholy state.
The poems that were published as Ingcamango Ebunzimeni appeared in Imvo Zabantsundu in the latter months
of 1912 on different dates. The difficulty posed by this serialisation of the poems is that, save for the heading
that all of them share, there is nothing to indicate that they may indeed be read as forming part of a greater
whole created under similar circumstances. It may be significant to recount here a summation of their
appearance to give perspective on this peculiarity. The first poem in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni (“Akuko
Nkanga Idubula Ingeti”) was published on the 20th August 1912 six months after Wauchope’s announced
release from prison. The second poem (“Ukhaka ka Mphetu”) was published a week later while the third poem
(“Imitunzi Enelanga”) appeared towards the end of September. The fourth poem (“Amahlat’apelile”) was part
of the October 27th issue of the newspaper. The last poem was published on the 5th of November. Wauchope
seems to have been careful to note the dates in which some of the poems were written. “Akuko Nkanga
Idubula Ingeti” and “Ukhaka ka Mphetu” were dated as having been completed on the 17th of March 1910 and

50
the 17th of July 1910 respectively. The remaining poems are similarly undated. There is nowhere in Imvo
Zabantsundu where the reasoning behind such a dis-junctured pattern of publication and recording is provided.
Indeed, by the time that “Imitunzi Enelanga” was published, there was no indication at all – as with the
previous poems – that the poems were written in Tokai. As we have speculated, the only directive towards
reading the poems collectively is their larger heading: “Ingcamango Ebunzimeni”. What seems to inform a
strategy of reading the poems as part of a collective constellation, as much as their indicative supra-title, is the
constancy with which the poems themselves grope towards comparative equivalents between Christianity and
redemption. The almost seamless elision that occurs between the two gives the poems not only their moral
weight but necessarily places them, and, consequently, their author, in the crossroads of history where the
foundation of a new African identity was deeply imbedded, in the poet’s vision, in the universalism of
Christianity. In the form of the poems, Wauchope drew from African and European poetic traditions, creating
poems that were as eclectic in their stylistic features as they were concerned with negotiating the transitional
pathways of history that the modern African had been set on.

In “Akuko Inkanga Idubula Ingeti” the speaker shuns all earthly possessions for the sole eternal truth of
“carrying the Cross” (Kukutwala Umnqamlezo). The imagery that is developed is erected as stalks preceding
yet never superceding the truth of “believing in the Lord” (Kukukolwa enkosini):

Wealth is leaves,
It is vanity of vanities
It runs with wings
Like the flower of Ragwort.

Wisdom fails
When the old pass away
It loses times
When the new appears.

[Ubutyebi ngamaqabi,
Mgamampunge ka mampunge;
Bubaleka ngamapiko
Njenge ntyantyambo ye Nkanga.

51
 Ubulumko buyatshitsha
Akudlula amadala
Bupalelwa ngamaxesha
Kwakuvela ke amatsha.]

The need to abort old ways and adopt Christianity is similarly expressed in “Imitunzi Enelanga” (Sunny
Shades). At first, the poem broaches the theme with an air of generality: “Who in the world has no enemies?/
Who looks not around as he walks?/ Who expects no news as he sits?/ Who is restless in his sleep?” However,
the speaker’s resolve to shed “the bad”42 is related, in some stanzas, to ‘primitive’ practices that provide one
merely with ‘Sunny Shades’. The oxymoron that forms the title of the poem indicates the futility of seeking
safety under such shades. The sojourner that the speaker depicts

goes in and out looking for what can’t be found,

Each bush is a Sunny Shade,
Doctors gave him the first medicines
While diviners report mysteries.

[Utunga epuma efuna inqaba,

Tyolwana likoyo nguMtunz'onelanga,
Ogqira besaza, bamp’awokuqaba,
Zibe izanuse zihlab’izimanga.]

In other instances, “He often drives sorrows away with liquor” (Upata kugxota intsizi ngotywala), only to
realise later that “Sorrows come and debts overwhelm him” (Zivele inzingo amwel’amatyala). The speaker’s
resolution to these demises is akin to that pronounced in “Akuko Nkanga Idubula Ingeti”:

Leave darkness! Come to the light!

Take up the shield and trust in faith!
Aim forward and go to the cross!
And leave the sunny shades of sins.

[Pum’ebumnyameni! Yiza ekukanyeni!

52
 Qubula ikaka umise nge kohlo!
Funzela pambili uy’emnqamlezweni!
Ushiy’imitunz’enelanga yezono.]

Wauchope pursues the theme of discriminating “the bad” more sharply in “Amahlat’apelile” (No Hiding
Place).43 The poem enumerates and criticizes the traditional practices “performed by people who believe that
their lives are protected by the ancestors” as false refuges for “Fearfulness produces amulets” (Amakhubalo e
Ntloni) and didactically concludes that “only Christ is the ultimate redeemer.”44 In seeking a historical
example whose influence best emblematises the changing terrain of spiritual orientation from a traditional to a
Christian predisposition, Wauchope draws upon the familiar figure of Ntsikana. Ntsikana’s signatory position
as a prophet of Christianity conduits the speaker’s turn towards a consideration of Christianity:

Somewhere there is a great forest

Which Ntsikana talked about.
There dwells the broad-shouldered one
Who died for the wretched of the earth.

[Kuk’ihlati elikulu,
Elaxelwa ngu Ntsikana,
Kuk’Ongxalaba likulu,
Owafela intsizana.]

The image of “the broad shouldered one” is significant in the history of the development of Christian Africans
among the Xhosa for “the broad-shouldered one” appears, in some of Ntsikana’s visions, “as a Christ-like
figure and the term today is a common praise name for Jesus.”45 The didacticism of the speaker is held forth
towards the end of the poem where he exhorts heathens to “Get rid of your charms and spells” (Lahla ezo
Puludyasi). In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker offers a somewhat self-reflexive prayer on his own
behalf:

I come to you now my God,

Protection forest of the faithful
Father, when I reach home

53
 Do not thrust your son away.

[Ndiza kuwe Tixo, Bawo,

Nqaba, Hlati lama Kolwa,
Bawo xa ndigodukayo,
Ungamgxot’unyana wako.]

There is no explanation given for this turn of phrase. The tone of the poetry had been, until this ending of
“Amahlat’apelile”, self-assured about the infinite returns of one’s commitment to Christianity. The speaker’s
lack of certitude about his place with God is, of course, deeply indicative of Wauchope’s own sad attempts to
find peace with the difficulties that had befallen him. “Uzalo Olutsha” (New Birth) follows, with a similar
concern for the spiritual wellbeing of the self, closely on the theme of salvation. The speaker seems smitten by
that one can be “born again!/ Already having a house and children” (Abuy’azalwe!/ Sele nendlu nabantwana).
Having contemplated that “to be born again” should be “the Will/ Of the creator of all” (yilo Ntando/ Yo
Mnini nto zonke), the speaker’s resignation to God renders his speech, in the end, into a prayerful address to
God:

As a child I will stumble

Be closer to me.
As blind I will get lost
Walk then before me
I am weak and faultering
I will fall when you move away
Get me closer to you.

[Ndingumntwana ndokubeka
Yiba kufupi kum,
Ndiyimfama ndolahleka
Hamba ke pambi kwam
Ndityafile ndiyajeza
Ndohle ndiwa wakushenxa
Ndisondeze kuwe.]

54
The essential moral idea expressed at the end of “Amahlat’apelile” and “Uzalo Olutsha” is a genuflection
towards the presence of weakness in the human spirit in its quest to lead a corporeal existence, even though it
is seen to be bounded by high religious principles. Nyamende’s comments on the ‘vague intimations’ that
some of the poems in Ingcamango Ebinzimeni have does indicate that there may well have been an intent to
express, in subdued terms, Wauchope’s own personal predicament. Nyamende surmises that “one can guess
that Wauchope would not have been allowed to publish poetry from prison if it was detected that he made
references to his case and/or his imprisonment. For this reason the poems are masked by idiomatic expressions
while the bodies of the poems remain mainly allegorical and obscure.”46 Indeed, the anxieties of spiritual
adequacy that are, in the aforementioned two poems, indicative of an individual quest for salvation and
redemption. We shall return to this aspect of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni once more below.
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, then, presents us with a series of tensioned opposites, from the catalyst-like role of
Christianity in the transformation of the ‘falsehoods’ of traditional beliefs into the ‘light’ of the ways of God to
the wanton human search for the spiritual paternalism of Christianity in the quest for an other-worldly eternal
existence in God’s bosom. The former has been discussed through the use of historical tropes such as
Ntsikana’s prophetic vision and the battle of Amalinde. The exploration of historical events for the purposes of
moral observation is found in “UKhaka ka Mphetu” (Khaka of Mphetu). Khaka’s mischevious omnipresence
is equated with that of Mnyaluza, the son of Rharhabe who, in the midst of an imminent attack of the Ndlambe
by the Ngqika, forfeited his allegiance to the former:47

UKhaka kaMphetu sesika Mnyaluza,

Etimba ku Ngqika apose ku Ndlambe
Atimbe kuNdlambe apose ku Ngqika
Unjalo uKhaka ka ‘Mphetu.

Nguyena Satana uKhaka ka Mphetu

Oratshi likulu laduba izulu
Ongumbabatizi, utshaba lwabantu
U Mhendi u Mtyoli I Xok’elikulu.
Unjalo uKhaka ka’Mphetu.

[Khaka of Mphetu is like Mnyaluza

Who captured from Ngqika and gave to Ndlambe

55
 Captured from Ndlambe and gave to Ngqika
That is how Khaka of Mphetu is.

The real Satan is Khaka of Mphetu

Whose great pride troubled heaven
The baptizer, enemy of humanity
The Tempter Devil the great Liar
That is how Khaka of Mphetu is.]

The repetitions of the poem (Unjalo uKhaka ka ‘Mphetu), as well as its contained units of reference, create a
structure that is somewhat reminiscent to that of praise poetry. The negative connotations ascribed to Khaka
create antinomy and tension with the Christianity that the speaker has been concerned to enunciate as a
salvation. Hence, the dualistic play of opposites so often visible in the poems contrast two irreconciliable
forces in which the self-ness of Africans is seen to lay in the cusp of a new identity.

The themes of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, perhaps precisely because of their deep investment in a Christian
eschatology, are profoundly symptomatic of the ‘new’ African’s attempts to envision their modernity. The
dyadic nature of the images and references that seek to draw Christianity apart from traditionalism envisions
the transition from the one to the other as a process tantamount to gaining salvation. The modernist, Christian
sensibility of Wauchope is also notable in his attempts to unite his thematic concerns with poetic forms
couched in half-rhymes and carefully written out metric schemes, decidedly western influences. Each line in
“Akuko Nkanga Ibudula Ingeti”, for instance, consists of stanzas with an equal number of lines and an equal
number of ten syllables ending, often, on the same vowel or repeated vowels: “U-bu-lu-mko bu-ya-tshi-tsha/
A-ku-dlu-la a-ma-da-la/ Bu-pe-le-lwa nga-ma-xe-sha/ Kwa-ku-ve-la ke a-ma-tsha” (italics mine).
Though each poem is structurally distinct, there is such an internal coherence within each poem. For an early
figure in modern African literature in South African such as Wauchope was, this kind of literary
experimentalism, which can be traced back in his career to the 1880s, has a pioneering significance.
Isaac Wauchope’s deeply resignant attitude towards traditional African practices, as it is encapsulated in
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, tends to carve the terrain of difference between the aforementioned and Christianity
as essential and further a problem of moral orientation. In chapter one, our discussion has tended to glean that
the two were more complex constellations of ideas and cultural practices and furthermore shared comparable
qualities. Wauchope’s sharp departure from his usual multifaceted approach to the cultural universe of the

56
Christian African can be read, as we have suggested, as having been occasioned by the deep personal
introspection that his imprisonment has set him on. For his desire to remain “hidden under the cross of Jesus”
is a theme strongly manifest in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni as it was in his own personal plight. Perhaps what lay
behind such a peremptory claiming of Christianity was a profoundly disturbed experience of dislocation that
found Wauchope writing poems that, like his aforesaid resolve, were meant to fortify his spirit.

* * *

Ingcamango Ebunzimeni defines a difficult and distinct period in the life of Isaac Wauchope. Our prior
discussion of his writings in the previous chapter has focused on how his writing tended to be ostensibly
drawn into the pubic radar of the African community that he lived in and the struggles that it was faced with.
As we have already observed, this social context pressed his writings into an essentially dialogic interaction
with his readers. That the poems contained in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni appeared considerably after they had
been written is unusual given the characteristic topicality of Wauchope’s writings prior to these years.
However, the myriad issues that surround the presentation of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, from the content of the
poems to the circumstances of their publication, moreover signify a complex and contradictory order of social
organisation. Taken in a context of the Christianisation of Africans in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth centuries, the travails that beleaguered Wauchope during this period of his life tend to be
symptomatic of the problematic status both within and without European modernity that Africans occupied
rather than a singular catastrophe. It is significant, for instance, that the subjects of Paul La Hauss de
Lalouviere’s biographical work: Petros Lamula and Lymon Maling, are outcast – similarly to Wauchope - by
the very religious institutions for which they laboured as evangelists. At the centre of the personal struggles of
his subjects, La House de Lalouviere opines that “contradictory social action was a mirror of a contradictory
social order.”48 Considered as a praxis of social significance the poems contained in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni
similarly place their author in the web of a “contradictory social order” and furthermore reflect that
complexity. It is not simply that the poems are reflective of the said necessity for the Christianisation of
Africans as signifiying modern sensibilities but also that the very ideological and spiritual tools, images and
sensibilities that were acquired by Wauchope as a result of his western education supplied him with the images
with which to, in turn, depict and measure the resilience that he needed to cultivate in order to negotiate the
controversy that his life had been thrown into. The proceedings of his trial already indicate that the secular
institutions meant to determine innocence and guilt and accordingly mete out the appropriate action

57
(punishment or amelioration) were not predisposed in the favour of an African, much less a ‘civilised’ African.
Thus, it seems that what Wauchope encountered was not only modernity’s failure to incorporate Africans and
treat them as equal subjects but also a suspicion towards the very examples of ‘civilisation’ in Africa that they
were meant to be. The place of “hardships” that we can envisage as having been the site of the development of
the insights presented in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni can thus be read as signifying the alienation that Wauchope
experienced at the pitfalls of modernity. The poems, then, in their yearning for Africans to forge further into
modernity, were strangely written from a position of having been denied that very position. The question that
these contradictions beg of us to ask is what, then, do we make of suffering, ‘dying for the truth’ and ‘carrying
the cross’, for instance, as a signifier of meaning other than their superficial status as simple biblical
references? It is tempting to insert here a caveat about the question of the ‘allegorical’ state - as Nyamende has
suggested - of some of the intertextual references found in the poems. Such an understanding of textuality as
capable of signifiying in the realm of more than a singular referent is a matter that Hofmeyr has already
explored in her inquiry into the significance of quotation and intertextually in the Lovedale Literary Society.
The intertextual affinities forged through the use of quotations and the incorporation of canonical texts within
a singular textual entity involved, for the early African intelligentsia, the seaming and paring together of two
comparative realms of experience. Thus, between the African subject and the specific text he invokes, what
one is meant to glean is the world of African subjectivity.49 In “Akuko Nkanga Idubula Ingeti”, the speaker
outlines the perilous-ness of even the good for

Goodness – kindness –
Destroys its owner
To those, foolish is the land
The righteous has no reward.

[Ukulunga – ububele –
Bubulala umninibo;
Kwabo lizwe bubudenge,
Ilungis’alina mvuno.]

The speaker’s negative disposition toward the efficacy of goodness, kindness, and righteousness is indicative
of a social order in which the practice of positive moral values is affronted with “no reward”. Traducing such
an inimical social terrain would prove, therefore, to be tantamount to “carrying the Cross”. The connotative

58
meanings associable with “carrying the Cross”; namely persecution and suffering, wrest the image of bearing
the cross from one solely denoting Christ to one that signifies the Christ-like suffering of one who does good
in a world of uncertainties. As the speaker goes on to exhort, what remains “Is believing in the
Lord” [Kukukolwa e Nkosini] in a world full of the snags of alienation from worldly attainments of different
kinds.

What is peculiar about the opposition between alienation and Christianity erected in the above mentioned
poem is indeed the timing of the presentation of such ideas. One could infer that as Wauchope sought to
assuage himself from his place of “hardships” through a fortified Christianity, what he encountered, similar to
our above discussion, is a world of alienations. In other words, Wauchope would seem so well acquainted with
the alienations that he writes of in Ingcamango Ebunzimeni because they were, in a sense, the terrain of
contradictions that he was affronted with as a Christian African. The ethical significance of a poem such as
“Akuko Nkanga Idubula Ingeti” thus lies in its critique of how, in the face of what I have called the failure of
modernity, Wauchope had to journey further into Christianity as the “one thing [that] does not change.” The
significance of shedding all that the world offers as trappings for the sole truth of “believing in the Lord” is
precisely its ability to render a critique of the uncertainty that comes with leaning on anything else. The
profound difficulty of being social is left as an untenable maze of contradictions, without end but to be
endured. More than this, read through the tropes of the poem, Wauchope had begun ‘carrying the cross’ and
held on to the one thing that he felt could sustain him.

Notes to Chapter Two.

59
1
Wauchope, The Natives, p. 7.
2
Wauchope, Imvo Zabantsundu, 4th March, 1901.
3
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 177.
4
De Kock, Civilising Barbarian, p. 139.
5
Wauchope, The Natives, p. 38.
6
Ibid., p. 3.
7
Shepherd, R.H.W., Lovedale: South Africa 1824-1955, (Lovedale Press, 1971), p. 1.
8
Wauchope, The Natives, p. 7.
9
Ibid.
10
Mudimbe, V.Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, (Bloomington/London:
Indiana University Press/James Currey, 1988), p. 2.
11
Wauchope, I., Imvo Zabantsundu, 1901.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Wauchope, The Natives, p. 8.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid, p. 15.
17
Ibid., p. 17.
18
Thompson, T.J., Touching the Heart, p. 177.
19
Ibid., p. 178-179.
20
Wauchope quoted in Touching the Heart, p. 179.
21
Imvo Zabantsundu, 15th February, 1916, p. 6.
22
Ibid.
23
Nyamende, The Life and Works.
24
Ibid, p. 407.
25
See Ibid., p. 145.
26
Thompson, Touching the Heart, p. 183.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 145.
31
Jabavu quoted in Thompson, Touching the Heart, pp. 184-185.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., p. 184.
36
Imvo Zabantsundu quoted in Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 414.
37
Ibid., p. 415.
38
Wauchope quoted in Thompson, Touching the Heart, p. 188.
39
Wauchope quoted in Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 418.
40
Ibid.
41
I have elected to use the translated title of the poem found in T.J. Thompson’s Touching the Heart, p. 164.
42
See Wauchope in Imvo Zabantsundu, 6th May, 1901.
43
I have used the translation of the poem found in Thompson’s Touching the Heart, pp. 174-175.
44
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 408.
45
Hofmeyr, I., The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress, (Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, 2004), p. 119.
46
Nyamende, The Life and Works, p. 409.
47
Peires, The House of Phalo, p. 66.
48
La Housse de Lalouviere, Restless Identities, p. 3.
49
Hofmeyr, “Reading Debating/Debating Reading” p. 274.
 Conclusion

Isaac Wauchope made his final journey on board the Mendi in the midst of the First World War. His years
worn to their twilight – he was to be 65 years old in 1917 – he volunteered to serve in a war that seemed to
have much less to do with the interests of Africans than the South African War of over a decade earlier.
Furthermore, in the few years preceding the outbreak of the First World War his life was marked by a trial that
saw him consigned to prison by a colonial judiciary that showed no interest in regarding the actions of an
African minister with any sympathy. However, the perplexing irony that seems to underlie such a resolve to
act as a defender of imperial sovereignty was that, as Nyamende has suggested, “for Wauchope a need to win
recognition for his people by the British and the South African governments must have been one of this
reasons.”1 It is significant that, in the aftermath of the sinking of the Mendi the Mendi Memorial Bursary Fund
was founded to “increase black self-esteem through education and to stimulate an awareness of education as
an important weapon in the struggle against white domination.”2
In the days and months following the debacle of the sinking of the Mendi, Wauchope emerged as a figure of
legendary stature among Africans. As some reports have mentioned, when the Mendi was met with certain
demise and the men in stricken by panic, a voice called out:

Be quiet and calm countrymen, for what is taking place is exactly what you came to do. You are
going to die…but that is what you came here to do. Brothers, we are drilling the death-drill. I, a
Zulu say you are all my brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your war-cries brothers, for
though they made us leave our assegais at the kraals, our voices are left with our bodies.3

The men are said to have died with their “arms uplifted and fists clenched”, singing a war-chant as the Mendi
sank.4 The accuracy of this description has been subject to dispute, however, what remains for posterity is the
stoic and defiant nationalism of Wauchope whose call for his fellow Africans to stand united in death is a
reminder of the sacrifices that Africans had to make in order to gain a measure of recognition in a colonial
milieu that enlisted their services beyond the shores of South Africa while in their homeland they suffered
exclusions from the franchise of which the Native Land Act of 1913 remains a poignant signifier. Such a
contradiction bears great resemblances with the social tensions that we have sought to argue as having
informed the writing of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. It has been a primary concern of mine to argue that it is
precisely the contradictory nature of colonial modernity that compelled Wauchope to write texts that seemed

61
to open European modernity up to its promises to its African subjects, even in the face of the closure of such a
development. In seeking to lodge the presence of Africans deeper in the structures of the European institutions
that reminded them of their race as a convenient sign of difference, inferiority and exclusion, Wauchope
yearned for and affirmed the universalism of the values that they had acquired as modernised Africans.
Ingcamango Ebunzimeni, then, brought to the centre of Wauchope’s reflection the sacrificial nature of the
Christian African’s commitment to modernity.

62
Notes to Conclusion

63
1
Nyamende, M.A., The Life and Works, p. 422.
2
Grundlingh, A. Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War, (Johannesburg: Ravan Press,
1987), p. 139.
3
Quoted in Nyamende, M.A. The Life and Works, p. 432.
4
Ibid.