Citashe's Apostrophe — “Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga”: The Unfinished “Preface” to an African Modernity

Abstract

The poem “Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga” has had a sustained salutary presence in South African literary and cultural criticism of the past three decades, especially when it has been concerned with the experiences of Christianized, modern Africans. The criticism of the poem provides an entry-point into how “Zimkile!” itself has been reproduced and used. I contend that, although this scholarship has done much to illuminate some of the complexities of the modern African's responses to European modernity, it has ignored dealing with the moment of its production and circulation in the late nineteenth century.“Zimkile! Mfo wohlanga” formed part of a larger text in which its author, in this instance signing himself as I.W.W. Citashe, was concerned with formulating strategies for dealing with the incarceration of Xhosa regents who were seen as figureheads of the Xhosa nation. The modes of address undertaken in the poem, as the clinching resolution of the issues presented in the larger text, meant that in addressing an African readership, its author mobilized complex narrative strategies that interpellated the African intellectual's traditional heritage into his modern sensibilities at a time when modern Africans had to contend with the antinomies of a colonial existence.