From Shakais Court to the Trade Union Rally: Praises in a Usable Past

Abstract

Any delineation of literature from southern Africa could make a case for the centrality of praise poetry. Praising is our original and distinctive form. It is also highly adaptable to changing circumstances, an adaptability summarized in the title of this paper. A more problematic consideration is what it is we should continue to value in praise poetry. To treat the texts, formally, as structures of style fixed in printed versions is to ignore the character of their occasions. To follow the scholar's approach and understand praises as expressions of another time and place is to risk anachronism, and to deny the element of adaptability I have just mentioned. With topical modifications, for example, the "Praises to King Shaka," 1 have traveled beyond the 1820s to play a potent role in an ongoing political process, whether at the Battle of Isandlwana where in 1879 Zulu military might crushed the British or, more recently in KwaZulu-Natal, in struggles for resources, political power, and Zulu "authenticity." Yet despite contemporaneous marshalings of the Zulu heroic memory, Shaka's praises obviously find their motor energy in another time and place; they do not simply transcend their pastness, and, in consequence, one may be caught in something of a moral dilemma. To appreciate praises that glorify the war-like ethos of another age could sit awkwardly, in South Africa, alongside a desire for reconciliation and healing. Yet to avoid attending to the expression because it does not reinforce one's own modern, democratic preferences is to signal the demise of any historical perspective on our human understandings.