The writer was a personal friend and colleague of Mazisi Kunene’s for many years.
On Aug. 11, Mazisi Kunene, one of the greatest African poets in history, died. He was named poet laureate of Africa in
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Literary critics have likened his epic poems, “Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic” and “Anthem of the Decades,” to Homer’s “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad.”
Kunene was born on May 12, 1930, in Durban, South Africa. Growing up under apartheid, Kunene looked to his Zulu heritage proudly. The Zulu emperor, Shaka, who ruled over a large area of southern Africa in the early 19th century, created an army that later defeated the British in battle.
The stark contrast between what Kunene knew to be his rich and powerful heritage and the reality of living under the brutal domination and racism of white colonial rule led him to become committed to the cause of self-determination for his and all African peoples.
Kunene became politicized as a teenager, when he began to understand how all aspects of white colonial rule over what had been many sovereign cultures across the continent stripped Africans of their heritage and history.
Kunene was an outspoken proponent of the Pan-African movement, linking together all African peoples, those living in their ancestral homelands as well as Africans of the diaspora.
While still in South Africa, he became involved in the African National Congress. Forced into exile in 1959, he lived in Europe until the early 1970s. During that time he became the chief representative for the ANC in Europe and Africa and played a pivotal role in the founding of the anti-apartheid movement in Britain.
Kunene persuaded artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Henry Moore to donate works for an exhibition to raise funds for the ANC.
Anti-apartheid fighter
Although Kunene used his writing as a political weapon against European colonial rule, he believed in the necessity of armed revolutionary struggle for self-determination.
As part of his defiance against the subjugation of colonialism, Kunene wrote his great works in Zulu, and not in
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His poetry and other writings were banned by the racist South African regime in 1966.
In 1975, he moved from Europe to the United States where he joined the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles. There, Kunene taught African literature and the Zulu language.
Despite South Africa’s ban on Kunene’s literature, in 1979 the ANC distributed “Emperor Shaka the Great” to its guerilla fighters to inspire them in their struggle against the racist apartheid regime. (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 19)
The work begins with a call to remembrance:
After the night has covered the earth
Rouse us from the nightmare of forgetfulness
So that we may narrate their tales
You will see them, the forefathers, by the brightness of the Moon.
You will see their great processions as they enter the mountain!
Eternally their anthems emerge
How then can we be silent before the rising sun?
How wonderful! We can sing the sacred songs of our
Forefathers!
By our ancient epics we are made beautiful.
Whether in Europe, Africa or the United States, Kunene’s focus was the same. “My commitment to the liberation of the people of South Africa is not determined by where I am located,” Kunene told the LA Times in 1985.
Kunene retired from UCLA at the end of 1992. He left Los Angeles and returned home to South Africa the next year as the apartheid system collapsed.
Workers, artists, academics and freedom fighters everywhere will miss Kunene. His lifetime was full of struggle and revolutionary resistance to oppression. Through his essays and poems, Kunene was a militant, revolutionary voice for equality.
