Recruitment and Re-Memory: S.E.K. Mqhayi’s ‘Umkosi Wemidaka: The Dark-Skinned Army’ (1916) and Fred Khumalo’s Dancing the Death Drill (2017)

Abstract

The poem by the great isiXhosa poet and imbongi S.E.K. Mqhayi, ‘Umkosi Wemidaka: The Dark-Skinned Army’ (1916), inspired and encouraged Africans to volunteer for the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) in the First World War. Employing techniques of traditional poetry, Mqhayi’s work marks the transition from oral to written literature. By the 1950s, various accounts from the oral tradition, including other poems and news reports by Mqhayi, gave rise to a nationalist mythology on the sinking of the SS Mendi, including an apocryphal speech of the Reverend Isaac Dyobha and a legendary ‘Death Drill’. In 2017, 100 years after the sinking of the troopship SS Mendi in 1917, her political and symbolic legacy continues to inform the national narrative, given the extensive media coverage of the event in 2016/2017 and other acts of commemoration by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). Fred Khumalo’s recent novel, Dancing the Death Drill (2017), fictionally re-enacts the Mendi story and is informed by precolonial and modern African voices. Using a form of allegorical realism, Khumalo embarks on a process of ‘re-memory’ in shaping the life of a mixed-race protagonist and survivor of the Mendi disaster who emigrates to France, only to face demons from his past. Each work is contextualised and analysed here to reveal how, at different historical junctures, both writers use language to discover places of resistance and thereby reassert black agency and alternative histories. However, Khumalo is more closely integrated into a ‘metropolitan’ culture associated with global trends and seems to have lost much of Mqhayi's imperial allegiance. While the generic indeterminacy of the novel confronts contemporary racial tensions, Mqhayi's panegyric to the men of the Mendi exhibits a robust adherence to traditional form and mode. Khumalo’s choice of a ‘mixed-race’ hero suggests the search for a hybrid cultural identity more aligned with contemporary South African society as it endeavours to move beyond legacies of racism and colonialism.