Författare: Tinashe Mushakavanhu Research Associate University of Oxford

South African poetry, rich with history, has long been an underappreciated cornerstone of the country’s cultural landscape. But a new free-to-access digital archive is helping change that.

Focused on the poets published by a small but important press in a town called Makhanda in the Eastern Cape province, the Deep South Books and Archive initiative seeks to elevate their voices by offering an archive of background information about their work and lives as well as extensive excerpts from their books. It’s a rare window into a vital but overlooked tradition of South African literature.

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Robert Berold, after spending a decade as editor for New Coin journal, set up Deep South in 1995. For decades he has had a quiet influence on the South African poetry scene. His impulse to publish emerged from a place of need and outrage that some of the talented young black poets he was publishing in New Coin couldn’t get their books published in the new, democratic South Africa.

Deep South Books

Many of these poets had been using their words to fight for freedom, while a new generation of young poets was emerging with democracy. Ever since, Deep South has been an important arena where South African poets and their poems could speak to one another.

My work on African literary production shows the importance of small presses in creating local literary ecologies.

For Berold, the mission was always:

To publish what was considered to be innovative and risk-taking South African poetry, regardless of market limitations.

His many endeavours as a publisher, editor and teacher have been linked by the effort to rescue from oblivion, to supply context, to indicate points of continuity while insisting on the diversity of the South African experience.

Deep South Books

After 30 years of publishing, Berold is now sharing a vast catalogue and archive that would otherwise remain unknown. Even though the African Poetry Digital Portal, hosted by the University of Nebraska in the US, was created as a resource for the study of the history of African poetry from antiquity to the present, it does not give direct reference to particular communities.

In bringing this archive to the internet, Berold is revealing the process and method of how contemporary South African poetry has been shaped into being.

Behind the poems

Much of the archive material is what Berold accumulated in dealing with the poets – correspondence, manuscripts, reviews. This is also physically deposited at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. He explains:

I got into correspondence with everyone who sent in poems, trying to give helpful criticism, recommending poets for them to read. There was a certain inappropriateness about this at times, and some arrogance too on my part, but mostly people appreciated the feedback.

The “difficult miracle of Black poetry”, as US poet June Jordan once remarked, is that it persists, published or not, loved or unloved. In racially segregated South Africa during apartheid, publishing spaces were few and far between.

Black poets were often censored, banned or exiled as their work confronted the injustices of a racist system. This digital archive recasts the story of South African poetry as insurgent, independent and driven to define a distinct aesthetic.

Deep South Books

Deep South has, furthermore, made a particular impression by fostering a unique aesthetic in South African poetry through its investments in typography and design. As a small, independent press situated away from culture capitals – Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg – it has had the freedom to experiment.

Deep South Books and Archive is therefore a significant tribute to the persistence of South African poetry, despite many historical and structural inequalities. It is a catalogue and a digital archive that provides a unique entry point into modern South African poetry.

Inside the archive

The digital archive’s architecture is simple. The poets are indexed in alphabetical order. Some of the featured names are Vonani Bila, Mangaliso Buzani, Angifi Dladla, Mzwandile Matiwana, Isabella Motadinyane, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Khulile Nxumalo, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Lesego Rampolokeng, Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, Dimakatso Sedite and Phillip Zhuwao.

Clicking through the carousel of finely designed book covers leads one to excerpts, book reviews, interviews available as PDF files, as well as links to other multimedia resources.

Deep South Books

Rampolokeng’s work may be iconoclastic, experimental, unclassifiable but he found a home with this press. He has published several of his groundbreaking collections with them. Defying category, they bend and shift, and culminate into a remarkable linguistic virtuoso. His interviews are an extension of his art, reflexive, autobiographical, and works in themselves.

Unrecognised poets

Then there are poets like Motadinyane and Zhuwao who died far too early, leaving behind only single collections. Luckily, even if their portraits and writings are fragmentary, we’re at least witness to the poetic geniuses that might have been. This is the superpower of this archive, to serve as a memorial for a canon (or collection of literary texts) that wasn’t even close to being fully blossomed.

Deep South Books

Historically, canon construction is the work of the few, foremost among them academics who edit anthologies and design syllabuses. Most of these poets do not feature in scholarly journals. As a result they almost exist in the underground, unremarked. Berold, now in his 70s and approaching retirement, has decided to do something about that with a digital archive that surfaces the voices of lesser-known poets.

The lack of recognition for these poets is bothersome for him:

Why nobody in academe has registered the importance of these poets is beyond me. It really makes me wonder whether these professional literary people are able to read.

This is mostly an indictment of systems that undervalue black expression.

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This project may be for preservation, but there is another lesson: African literature demands constant acts of recovery. In this case, the internet serves as a kind of rear view mirror, which allows us a backward glance at poets and their works that have been overlooked or underappreciated, forgotten or misunderstood. Läs mer…

Zimbabwean art historian Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti travelled by road to five southern African countries – Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Mozambique and Zambia – in pursuit of hidden stories. His mission was to visit artists in their studios to learn about the environments in which they work and what inspires them.

Arak Collection

The opportunity to do the road trip arose from a writing fellowship with the Arak Collection, one of the largest contemporary African art collections in the Middle East.

The result is a new book called Chronicles of the Road: Five Nations, Five Artists that documents Muvhuti’s experiences. At the same time it maps and gathers voices that are not often encountered in academic studies, or even on bookstore shelves.

As a scholar of southern African literary cultures and intellectual histories, I interviewed Muvhuti about his project.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Your new book visits places that are very diverse in terms of language, colonial histories, cultures. What did you learn from the trip and from the works of the artists you chose to profile?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: I intentionally opted to travel by road. I wanted to talk to fellow passengers on buses and public taxis. I wanted to appreciate the landscapes, the rugged terrains and the sacred sites, as well as gain insight into the people’s daily rituals, joys and struggles. I wanted to experience the vibe of the African market scene, and to chat with Yango (ride-hailing service) drivers.

Importantly, I wanted to gain an appreciation of the art scenes the selected artists work and operate in. I wanted to hear from other cultural workers working with the artists. I’ll admit that an exercise like this one needed more time than I had.

When Visiting Cape Town by Rudolph Seibeb.
Arak Collection/Rudolph Seibeb

These artists are inspired by different elements of their cultures and everyday practices, which makes the region’s art output so multifaceted, rich and complex. But the key lesson was that we share a lot in common, despite the colonial demarcations separating us, and the ethnic differences.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Exploring southern Africa through cartography, or mapmaking, can help our understanding of the region’s interconnected histories. Was mapping part of your objective?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Central to my project was the idea that the selected artists draw much from their surroundings. So I wanted to find out if there are transnational connections in their practices.

Le Combattant/Freedom is not free by Zemba Luzamba.
Arak Collection/Zemba Luzamba

You will be amazed to hear of the impact of #RhodesMustFall (a South African student protest movement calling for decolonisation) on the work of Botswana’s Thebe Phetogo. He was a student at the University of Cape Town when the fallist movement emerged.

An anecdote which excited me is the impact a 1990s visit to Zimbabwe had on Namibian artist Rudolf Seibeb’s thinking, making him explore other media. He’d visited the Batapata Workshop.

The Congolese artist Zemba Luzamba credits their South African mentor, woodcut artist Boyi Molefe, for the mixed-media collaging technique he uses. Their connection is a fruitful result of Luzamba’s migration to South Africa – despite it being a nation keen on driving out African migrants.

Even though southern Africa’s original inhabitants, the Khoisan, are rare in Zambia, their paintings inform Zambian artist Kalinosi Mutale’s abstract “Kalidrawings”.

Abase by Kalinosi Mutale.
Arak Collection/Kalinosi Mutale

Mozambican artist Nelly Guambe’s story of turning to the creative process as a form of catharsis has a universal appeal and resonates with the Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo’s practice. Like Kahlo, who took up painting while confined to her bed after a life-threatening accident, Guambe used art to help her recover after an accident in Maputo.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: You write that the research employs a biographical approach. The artists in the book were born between 1964 and 1993. Do they represent different generations, movements, or turns in the art history of the region?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Their ages seem to suggest intergenerational connections, yet they are all contemporary artists, working today.

Seibeb has been practising for a long time, though his work started being noticed only recently, thanks to spaces like The Project Room and the Cape Town Art Fair.

Memories by Nelly Guambe.
Arak Collection/Nelly Guambe

Mutale, who was very active up to the 1990s, had taken a hiatus from public art exhibitions because he felt his conceptual practice was misunderstood and unappreciated by the Zambian audience.

Zemba has lived in at least three countries, and migration stories inform his work.

Phetogo and Guambe are young artists whose careers and practices resonate with the work of other young artists in the region.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: What is the Arak Collection’s significance to African art?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: Arak is a Doha-based independent private collection of African art amassed over the past decade. Unlike the typical western collectors of African art that we are most used to, Arak is “committed to fostering critical dialogue around contemporary art practices, with a focus on African art through exhibitions, publications, research and educational programs”. It offers emerging writers and curators from the continent fellowships and opportunities that include workshops across Africa.

hill female hill by Lowe Male.
Arak Collection/Lowe Male

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Finally, what is your sense of the state of art writing in southern Africa?

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti: It is not very encouraging. Only South Africa has a regular and robust art writing practice. This is not surprising because South Africa has universities and art institutions which teach art history, curatorial studies and art criticism. It also has multiple platforms to publish the work.

The same cannot be said of nations like Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia or Zimbabwe, which are yet to introduce such programmes. The few art writers in these countries either learned the skill on their own or have been trained in South Africa or elsewhere.

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A lot more needs to be done to encourage art writing to complement the work the artists are doing. Some of these nations are producing some of the region’s most exciting artists whose work is not well covered or not noticed due to lack of art writing. Läs mer…