'Organize and Act': Cultural Rights in South African Communities

"Port Saint Johns" is in the line of one of the masterpieces of the Natal workers' oral poetry movement, Qabula's "Migrant's Lament," but extends Qabula's male-migrant subject position to include the lament of the daughters, now job-seekers along with the fathers whose cattle they used to herd as little girls, for whom they fetched water and firewood, with whom they ate wild berries and fruit, in the forests, streams, and hills along the Indian Ocean coast. "Wherever I am wherever I may be/ I'll always be yours," the daughter writes, constructing migrancy somewhat differently than Qabula's speaker, whose vision of the countryside is one of desolation and hunger, and whose mood is to press forward to do battle in the new scene of urban strife; his poem ends: "Now go, troublemaker, go!" The daughter, however, looks back as she too heads for Umlazi, Kwamashu, and the roar of the factories; and she sees the border behind her as provisional, less than final, refusing the tragic tone of Qabula's sense of loss (itself an echo of one of the founding poems of the twentieth-century Xhosa tradition, I.W.W. Citashe's 1892 "Your Cattle Are Gone"). "But eventually I'll come back/ No matter even if I come with nothing/ ... we are yours," concludes Gwiji's migrant daughter, perhaps claiming from the settler-State not only victory on the labor union battlefields but the promise of a restored land, healed of its colonial divisions into city and country. Just at the outset of her career, Votelwa Gwiji is an impressive product of the rural-urban cultural history which the teachers at the Durban Center have known how to lead their students to articulate and reflect upon in poems like these. On a broader scale, it is unclear how many of these centers are currently flourishing, though they have a history going back at least to the early seventies and the Black Consciousness movement, which like the unions in the eighties organized, coordinated, and diffused the work of local cultural groups affiliated with their politics; the important journal Staffrider began about the same time and published in permanent form much of the work of these Black Consciousness locals. But the Durban and Johannesburg centers I saw in 1993 have more in common, I believe (from conversations with the scholar-practitioners Zakes Mda and Bheki Peterson), with politically nonaligned cultural work like the rural Lesotho "theatre for development" Mda describes in his fascinating book When People Play People,