Overview

Iimbali Zamandulo – ‘Stories of the Past’– is a selection of historical testimonies produced by Xhosa-speaking residents of the Eastern Cape between 1838 and 1910. These narratives offer fresh insights into the history of the Xhosa-speaking peoples, providing their own perspectives on their own past. The volume contains recollections reaching back to seventeenth-century dynastic disputes, to a period preceding the southward migrations in the early nineteenth century into territories settled by Xhosa-speaking peoples. It passes on through those migrations, the clashes and resettlement of peoples and of individuals, the contest for land throughout the century, and on to the struggle for social control and the assertion of cultural identity by the century’s end. To a remarkable extent, we are lent intimate access here to the lives of ordinary people, seeking better pastures for themselves, their families and their livestock; hunting, fighting and, above all, confronting personal conflict in their choices between mission Christianity and ancestral beliefs; between support for their chiefs or the colonial authorities; between active or passive resistance to encroachment on their territory; and between colonial distortions purveyed in the schools and their receding grasp of their own sustaining histories.

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9781869144401

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Jeff Opland lives in Brecon in Wales and serves as Visiting Professor in the School of Languages at Rhodes University. He has produced numerous studies of Anglo-Saxon and Xhosa literature, and is an acclaimed editor and translator of Xhosa texts, including works by Nontsizi Mgqwetho (2007), I.W. Wauchope (2008), S.E.K. Mqhayi (2009, 2017), W.W. Gqoba (2015), D.L.P. Yali-Manisi (2015) and John Solilo (2016). Peter Mtuze graduated from Rhodes University majoring in isiXhosa and Translation. This culminated in doctoral degrees in African languages (PhD) and theology (DTh) from the University of Cape Town and Unisa respectively. He is the most prolific living isiXhosa writer and has produced widely acclaimed novels, short stories, essays, drama, poetry, autobiography and language books. His classic novel, UDingezweni, was published in 1966. He holds the singular honour of having translated former President Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, into isiXhosa.

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