MTSHALI, (Mbuyiseni) Oswald

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Nationality: South African. Born: Oswald Joseph Mtshali (changed name), Vryheid, Natal, 17 January 1940. Education: Queen of the Angels Primary School and Inkamana High School, Vryheid; Columbia University, New York, M.A. in creative writing, M.Ed., Ed.D. 1998; doctoral candidate, Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Family: Married 1) Margaret Mntambo in 1968 (divorced 1975), four children; 2) Glaudinah Jacoba in 1983. Career: Driver for an engineering firm, 1963–65; briefly imprisoned, then acquitted; after 1965 messenger and general delivery man, National Growth Fund investment company, Johannesburg; deputy headmaster, Pace Commercial College, Jabulani, Soweto; worked for South African Council of Churches; columnist, Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, 1972; arts critic, The Star, from 1979. Awards: Olive Schreiner prize, 1975. Address: 3 Washington Square Village, Bleeker Street, New York, New York 10012, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. Johannesburg, Renoster, 1971; London, Oxford University Press, and New York, Third Press, 1972.

Fireflames. Pietermaritzburg, Natal, Shuter and Shooter, 1980; Chicago, Chicago Review, 1983.

Play

Money Makes Madness, with Barney Simon and others, music by M. Davashe and others, adaptation of Volpone by Ben Jonson (produced Johannesburg, 1972).

Other

Editor, Give Us a Break: Diaries of a Group of Soweto Children. Johannesburg, Skotaville, 1988.

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Bibliography: Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, South African Poet: An Annotated Bibliography by Gillian Goldstein, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand Department of Bibliography, 1974.

Critical Studies: "Free As a Black, Free As a Poet," in Drum (Johannesburg), 22, May 1975; "Three South African Poets" by John F. Povey, in World Literature Written in English (Arlington, Texas), 16, 1977; "Protest Poetry in South Africa and Mtshali's Refuge under 'The Cryptic Mode'" by Igbarumun Igbudu, in Kuka (Zaria, Nigeria), 1979; "Books in English from the Third World" by Charles R. Larson, in World Literature Today (Norman, Oklahoma), 58(3), summer 1984; "Landscapes of Exile in Selected Works by Samuel Beckett, Mongane Serote, and Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali" by Cecelia Scallan Zeiss, in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, edited by Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan, Uppsala, Uppsala University, 1988; "Pictures of Social Discrimination: The Poetry of Oswald Mtshali" by David Olusegun Agbaje, in Literary Half-Yearly (Mysore, India), 32(2), July 1991; "The Rhetoric of Violence in South African Poetry" by Stephen Watson, in New Contrast, 78, 1992; "Apartheid and Christianity in Oswald Mtshali's 'Sounds of a Cowhide Drum'" by Karibi T. George, in Neohelicon (Amsterdam), 19(1), 1992.

Oswald Mtshali comments:

I am neither a romantic nor a traditionalist. Maybe I am a socially involved poet of South Africa, as Charles Dickens was a socially involved novelist of England.

I consider Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, and Yevtushenko as some of the poets I admire. I draw my themes from my life as I live and experience it. I write in the free verse form because it allows me more freedom in expression without the restriction of meter and rhyme. I depict the life of humanity as a whole as reflected in my environment, Mofolo Village; my community, Soweto; my society, Johannesburg; my country, South Africa. As an aspirant black poet in South Africa, I have no model poet on whom to base my style.

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No volume of poems published in South Africa has been as instantly successful as Oswald Mtshali's Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. It sold more than ten thousand copies in a year and paved the way for Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla, and other black poets of the 1970s. For probably the first time white South Africans found themselves interrogated in their own language by a black writer, and for most the experience was a revelation. As Mtshali remarked in 1972, "I think it is because people are curious and eager to know what the current of thought and feeling is between black and white … The gap between the races here is so wide that my book seems to have the effect of a stone thrown into a pond." This is well illustrated in "The Master of the House," in which the quiet and reasonable—and reassuring—tones of the black man ("illegally" visiting his wife in the servants' quarters) are edged with irony:

Master, I am a stranger to you,
but will you hear my confession?
 
I am a faceless man
who lives in the backyard
of your house...
 
As the rich man's to Lazarus,
the crumbs are swept to my lap
by my Lizzie...

The poem culminates, however, in an image taut with fear and menace:

I am the nocturnal animal
that steals through the fenced lair
to meet my mate,
and flees at the break of dawn
before the hunter and the hounds
run me to ground.

Mtshali's experience of the brutalizing effect of imprisonment was the catalyst that gave his work direction and purpose, yet compassion, irony, and a fine control of tone, rather than bitterness and anger, characterize Sounds of a Cowhide Drum. The free verse form makes for flexibility of tone, and he utilizes a wide range of speaking voices, from the innocent yet acute questions of a child ("Boy on a Swing")—

		Mother!
Where did I come from?
When will I wear long trousers?
Why was my father jailed?

—to the mocking chant of a road gang as they work under the eyes of a white foreman ("A Roadgang's Cry")—

It starts
as a murmur
from one mouth to another
in a rhythm of ribaldry
that rises to a crescendo
'Abelungu ngo' dam-Whites are damned
Basibiza ngo Jim-they call us Jim'

The verse ranges from the descriptive to the narrative and even anecdotal and is characterized by vivid metaphors and similes drawn from everyday experience. One is constantly aware that the speaker is—can only be—a black man writing with candor and wry humor of his life as a child and an adult in apartheid South Africa. Occasionally the writing becomes self-conscious or lapses into cliché; generally, however, the pressure of felt experience gives the verse authority and force. The brutal realism of "An Abandoned Bundle," in which a newborn baby "dumped on a rubbish heap" is torn apart by scavenging township dogs, modulates without contrivance or a hint of censure into

Its mother
had melted into the rays of the rising sun,
her face glittering with innocence
her heart as pure as untrampled dew.

Prompted mainly by the Soweto uprising of 1976, Mtshali's second volume, Fireflames, found a publisher only in 1980 and was promptly banned. Attractively illustrated by black artists from Natal and dedicated to "the brave schoolchildren of Soweto," the volume gives overt expression to what was implicit, but understated, in its predecessor. Even poems dealing with events that involved the poet personally lack the freshness of observation and sureness of touch that typify the first volume. Instead, there are an uncertainty of tone and a gaucheness of expression, as though the poet is not fully engaged with his subject matter. This is seen, for instance, in "This Poem Is for Ben":

Some poems are conceived in the womb of pain;
Others have their gestation in the placenta of hope;
A few flash through the mirror of the mind in
a sweet moment of madness;
(Young poets begin in gladness and end in madness;
the rest are nurtured in the plastic incubator of despair.)

Here the Wordsworthian quote is contrived, the effect banal. Equally pedestrian and lacking in urgency or individuality of expression are the poems of protest, the rallying cries and expostulations that make up the bulk of the volume. Empty rhetorical gestures, an uncomfortable melange of styles, and a shrillness of tone render these poems less than worthy of the events and persons they seek to commemorate. Occasionally Mtshali does strike a new note or come up with vividly realized images, as in "Walking in a Snowfall on Manhattan":

The sun was a dangling button
above the New York city skyline;
a blob of jelly
on the windshields of the yellow cabs,
those ubiquitous salamanders,
wiggling and slithering on slush-covered Broadway.

Generally, however, Fireflames offers little more than the embers of a talent that promised so much, an impression borne out by the dearth of new poems published since.

—Ernest Pereira