Inventing Xhosa Voice

This article examines the informing conditions and conventions of Thomas Pringle's poem “Makanna's Gathering”. I argue that despite its ostensible endorsement of Xhosa retaliation against colonial rule, the poem exhibits an obvious unease about Xhosa alterity that it attempts to contain by casting this threat within the conventions, borrowed from Walter Scott's novelistic treatment of gypsies, of the “wild” picturesque. Contrary to a received consensus that the poem is manifestly anti-colonial, I argue that, considered in the full implication of its context, it must be understood as an exhibit in the spectacle of empire rather than an indictment of it

Alterity · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Empire · Epistemology · Indictment · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Sociology · Xhosa · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture

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• The Dead Will Arise

  J B Peires, J Peires•The dead will arise•1989

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• The making of the colonial order

  Open Access•John Lambert•New Contree•1993

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• Southern African Literature

  John Povey, Stephen Gray•African Arts•1980

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