Ukugcina amagama: Keeping Names

“Tongues of their Mothers”
By Makhosazana Xaba¹

I wish to write an epic poem about Sarah Baartman,
one that will be silent on her capturers, torturers and demolishers.
It will say nothing of the experiments, the laboratories and the displays
or even the diplomatic dabbles that brought her remains home,
eventually.
This poem will sing of the Gamtoos Valley holding imprints of her
baby steps.
It will contain rhymes about the games she played as a child,
stanzas will have names of her friends, her family, her community.
It will borrow from every single poem ever written about her,
conjuring up her wholeness: her voice, dreams, emotions and thoughts.

I wish to write an epic poem about uMnkabayi kaJama Zulu,
one that will be silent on her nephew, Shaka, and her brother,
Senzangakhona.
It will not even mention Nandi. It will focus on her relationship
with her sisters Mawa and Mmama, her choice not to marry,
her preference not to have children and her power as a ruler.
It will speak of her assortment of battle strategies and her charisma as a
leader.
It will render a compilation of all the pieces of advice she gave to men
of abaQulusi who bowed to receive them, smiled to thank her,
but in public never acknowledged her, instead called her a mad witch.

I wish to write an epic poem about Daisy Makiwane,
one that will be silent on her father, the Reverend Elijah.
It will focus on her relationship with her sister Cecilia
and the conversations they had in the privacy of the night,
how they planned to make history and defy convention.
It will speak the language of algebra, geometry and trigonometry,
then switch to news, reports, reviews and editorials.
It will enmesh the logic of numbers with the passion that springs from
words,
capturing her unique brand of pioneer for whom the country was not
ready.

I wish to write an epic poem about Princess Magogo Constance Zulu,
one that will be silent on her son, Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
It will focus on her music and the poetry in it,
the romance and the voice that carried it through to us.
It will describe the dexterity of her music-making fingers
and the rhythm of her body grounded on valleys,
mountains and musical rivers of the land of amaZulu.
I will find words to embrace the power of her love songs
that gave women dreams and fantasies to wake up and hold on to
and a language of love in the dialect of their own mothers.

I wish to write an epic poem about Victoria Mxenge,
one that will be silent on her husband Griffiths.
It will focus on her choice to flee from patients, bedpans and doctors.
This poem will flee from the pages and find a home in the sky. It will
float below the clouds, automatically changing fonts and sizes
and translating itself into languages that match each reader.
It is a poem that will remind people of Qonce
that her umbilical cord fertilized their soil.
It will remind people of uMlazi that her blood fertilized their soil.
It will remind her killers that we shall never, ever forget.

I wish to write an epic poem about Nomvula Glenrose Mbatha,
one that will be silent on my father, her husband Reuben Benjamin Xaba.
It will focus on her spirit, one that refused to fall to pieces,
rekindling the fire she made from ashes no one was prepared to gather.
This poem will raise the departed of Magogo, Nquthu,
Mgungundlovana,
iNanda, Healdtown, Utrecht, kwaMpande, Ndaleni and Ashdown,
so that they can sit around it as it glows and warm their hands
while they marvel at this fire she made from ashes no one was prepared
to gather.

These are just some of the epic poems I wish to write
about women of our world, in the tongues of their mothers.
I will present the women in forms that match their foundations
using metaphors of moments that defined their beings
and similes that flow through our seasons of eternity.
But I am not yet ready to write these poems.

Makhosazana Xaba’s poem “Tongues of their Mothers” is about the stories of women and the various lineages that lead us to their stories. It is an epic poem—a long narrative poem about promi- nent figures and their deeds—but an ironic one as indicated by the final line: “but I am not yet ready to write these poems.” Xaba’s epic is ironic, because hers is not an epic poem in the Greek tradition, but a collection of names and deeds of women whose narratives have been misunderstood or ignored. Xaba inadvertently writes an epic poem even while she is still imagining such a poem as she repeats “I wish to write an epic poem.” An epic requires the writer to have as much information as possible about one particular figure, but Xaba has written about multiple figures using only fragmented information. Xaba has only enough infor- mation for a stanza and a wish to write lengthier poems for each woman. The poem embodies some of the challenges related to restorative work in feminist historiography, particularly in the context of precarity. By feminist historiography, I am referring here to a history that takes seriously the stories of women’s lives, not as peripheral figures, but as central historical and agentic actors who have shaped history and therefore the present. A feminist historiography responds to the patriar- chal historiography that has centralized the stories of white men, particularly from European and North American countries, as the makers of his- tory and the present. By precarity, I am referring to the precarity of the archive and the precarity of time, where some stories disappear because the cultural moment does not make space for them.

As a response to this poem and to the gaps in historiography more broadly, I have been exploring the practice of ukugcina amagama, to be the keeper of names, as an intellectual project as well as a feminist practice of care. Ukugcina amagama is from isiXhosa, the language I most often think and write in. In an Anglicized world, where English hegemony is so profound that at times it seems impossible to imagine knowledge in other languages, I have started using isiXhosa in my literary and historical work, as well as in my academic work, to puncture and disturb this reliance on English when we constitute knowledge. Ukugcina amagama means to keep names and to be the keeper of names, which effectively captures the work I do both in my teaching, and scholarship, and in my creative work. Ukugcina amagama is also a practice I grew up with. When I was younger, adults would meet me and instead of asking for my name they would ask for my family’s name. I was asked to introduce myself by the phrase ungumamni/ungumabani (Who are your people?), I began to realize that I was being located in relation to the names I brought into a room. So if people asked me ungubani/who are you, I would respond with ndingu MamGcina, uTyhopho, uXhamela … a mixture of the names of ancestors and their praises. This was my early practice of historical consciousness in a context where names were often shortened or changed at school to be more palatable and malleable for white English speakers.

As a practice, ukugcina amagama is about ukuzilanda, a consciousness about placing oneself in relation to a deep past in order to remember that not only am I never an individual—in the sense that I appear in relation to a lineage—but also that I am always responsible for keeping alive the names of others. I bring this consciousness of being a keeper of these names into the history work that I do and into the academy, but also into the public sphere. In 2022, my colleague Xolisa Guzula and I published a set of three books for children under the title Imbokodo:² Women Who Shape Us: 10 Extraordinary Leaders, Activists and Pioneers; 10 Curious Inventors, Healers and Educators; and 10 Inspiring Singers, Writers and Artists (available in English and four African languages). When we conceptualized Imbokodo, we had stories in mind which we had to piece together through an archive which we had both collected over time. In choosing to render these women’s stories in children’s books, we also made the claim that children’s books are intellectual work and knowledge production—that even the choices we made in the process of writing for children were reliant on broader questions about, agency, archive, care, and citation (for example, which women to include).

Gathering information was the first way in which we engaged with care. None of the women we wrote about have an institutional archive, so we had to construct the archive through our own research. I often hear people say “I’m going to the archives… I am going to this particular building… I am going to search for this particular box.” Researching and writing Imbokodo gave us a sense of encountering a scattered archive and what it means to think about care and the work that we do in relation to that archive that can be recreated in a book through which people can engage and develop their own relationship with that archive. We had to rely at times on secondary material but at times also on our own primary material which consisted mainly of newspaper articles and photographs. We collected much of our information for the series while making mental bookmarks over many years, an archival practice of ukugcina amagama. It is about remembering names, retrieving information from footnotes and margins and recreating them in a book. This act of collection was the first layer of care.

The process of choosing the names and stories of the women was the second layer of care. Our choices were subjective, informed by the gaps we had identified in how the same names are often regurgitated. We were interested in women who had not necessarily had the opportunity to write themselves into the grand narrative of women’s history in South Africa, which usually begins with the 1956 anti-pass march. We also had to balance visibility and invisibility, by placing in conversation with each other women who are often known only individually or in relation to men. For example, Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela is a hyper-visible name: she is known as Winnie Mandela. We wanted to contrast her with someone like Mabel Cetu, about whom we struggled to find a single image. Relying on Stephanie Jason’s work in order to get information about her, we were able to eventually find one image of her through the Drum Magazine archive. Or someone like Nomguqo Paulina Dlamini, about whom we managed to find information in a book published by the Killie Campbell Library. We contrasted her story with the hyper-visibility of someone like Charlotte Makgomo Mannya Maxeke, who over the past 30 years has become one of the most recognizable figures of the 19th century nationalist movement in southern Africa. She was the first black woman to get a degree from an international university (Wilberforce University in Ohio, USA) in 1901. At Wilberforce, one of her teachers was W.E.B. Du Bois, an African-American intellectual whose work has shaped Pan-African and African-American scholarship.

At the heart of this research are a few questions: Do we care enough about names that fall through the cracks? Do we care enough about stories that are not “sexy”? Do we care about stories that are not about the grand narrative? We also deliberately included women who fell out of the grand narrative because of their mobility. For example, we included Pumla Kisosonkole (born Ngozwana) in 10 Extraordinary Leaders, Activists and Protestors. She was born in South Africa and began her teaching career in missionary schools in the 1930s, but she moved to Uganda in 1939 when she married Christopher Kisosonkole. She became a prominent figure in the women’s movement in Uganda in the 1950s. Her story disrupts the narrative of mobility in the inter-war period and raises questions about transnationalism on the African continent and more globally.

The third layer of care was through the design process. Design can easily be taken for granted when planning books, especially those for younger audiences, because a well-established aesthetic has been developed in the global north. We chose to include portraits of all the featured women. This was easy for the more visible women, of course, but for some women we could find no images at all, such as Emma Sandile, who was born in the early 19th century. Instead of reinscribing the absence rendered by the void of a photographic image, we communicated this absence by inserting a silhouette of a young woman’s face. We did the same for Louisa Mvemve, about whom we found only newspaper articles but no images. This became an opportunity to communicate the question of representation and whether we care enough about black women’s subjectivity to render them on the page.

We were also lucky enough to engage with some of the women’s family members, who generously shared their personal archives. Family members of Lauretta Ngcobo, Madosini, Princess Magogo and Nontsikelelo Qwelane all chose to trust us and give us access to private archives. They communicated with us and shared images and previous publications to assist our research, and we shared our research and gave them the opportunity to read and approve draft chapters. Though many had never met us, they trusted us to honor the stories of their mothers and grandmothers.

The categories we chose were largely subjective, led by the context of when the book was written. The growth in the genre of mini-biographies celebrating women often privileges women in politics. One of our books conforms to this standard, but we chose to foreground creatives, as well as educators and healers more broadly given the context of the 2020 pandemic unfolding when we were writing the book. Teachers, nurses, and healthcare workers were at the forefront of the health crises, and we wanted to give attention to women in professions that have been taken for granted. These categories were informed by care, as teachers and healers are seldom considered as individuals but rather as a nameless mass of people without distinguishable identities.

The series is called Imbokodo in recognition of the Women’s March on 9 August 1956, where the chant “Wathinta abafazi, wathinta imbokodo”/ “You strike a woman, you strike a rock” emerged. This gave us the opportunity to link the 1956 march with the stories of women from the 19th century and into the current moment. We deliberately situated these books as intellectual work, as we went through the same methodology we use in our academic work; the only difference was the audience we had in mind.

The second book project I engaged in that demonstrates the importance of care was my collaboration with Makhosazana Xaba in 2023 which is a collection of columns by Noni Jabavu written in 1977 titled A Stranger at Home.³ From the outset, this project was beset with questions of care, as Xaba and I show in an article that maps out the journey with the publishers (Xaba and Masola). Born in South Africa in 1919, Noni Jabavu was a pioneer writer, broadcaster, and literary magazine editor in the 1960s. She published two memoirs during this period: Drawn in Colour (1960) and The Ochre People (1963). Only The Ochre People was published in South Africa by Ravan Press in 1982. We felt it relevant to reintroduce her back into South Africa through a collection of her columns, anticipating that her books would eventually come back into circulation. Throughout this journey we were in touch with her family, as we needed their permission to publish the columns. Much like our experience with Imbokodo, we had to build trust with the family and give them space to make their own decisions amidst family losses. This process unfolded over a few years, over which time Xaba wrote the introduction and I wrote the afterword.

These projects have crystalized the nature of erasure and how to think about it in relation to care and the legacy of carelessness that exists in some institutions. Archivists, museum curators, and others have bemoaned the lack of state funding that has contributed to this carelessness, and it seems there is a connection between care and larger systemic decisions that affects the work we do as historians. Erasure thus happens as a result of decisions about whose stories are worth being told and whose work is worth being used and reused.