Enkonzweni yesizwe

Celebrated by Nelson Mandela as 'a poet laureate of the African people' and known as Imbongi yesizwe (the poet of the nation) to his contemporaries, S.E.K. Mqhayi (1875-1945) was also a dramatist, novelist, biographer, historian and essayist.This book brings together and provides English translations of 52 essays by Mqhayi in isiXhosa, on education and religion, politics and language, acting, as Mqhayi put it, Enkonzweni yesizwe, in the service of the nation. The essays reveal much about his opinions and values and establish him as a prominent polemicist and social commentator exhorting and informing his readers. The Introduction includes a detailed account of Mqhayi's troubled relationship with the Lovedale Press and the heavy-handed editing of his writing throughout his career, while the appendix includes an important historical account of the violent death of Chief Hintsa at the hands of a colonial party led by Sir Harry Smith in 1835, as well as Mqhayi's short monograph on ritual sacrifice, Idini, both of them, like all the essays included here, long out of print and currently unavailable. The volume contributes to the ongoing effort to return Mqhayi's unrecognised writings to the public domain, thereby permitting a proper assessment of his singular contribution to Xhosa and South African literature and the rise of the African elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.