Join us for our in-person African Studies Workshop! The workshop series is a scholarly space for Africa-centered research, offering a diverse range of topics and scholarly backgrounds to explore historical and current conditions.
SPEAKER: Sanele KaNtshingana (Lecturer, University of Cape Town; Madela Fellow, Hutchins Center)
TITLE: “A Thickly Layered Reading: Political Authority and Xhosa-speaking Intellectuals in 19th Century Vernacular Newspaper ”
Discussant:Christopher Ouma & Paul Zeleza
Abstract: By 1862, Xhosa-speaking people in South Africa had not fully recovered from the 1856-7 cattle killing debacle. The chiefs were bruised and dislocated, and the suffering of Xhosa survivors was catastrophic. Many survivors were forced to be laborers in Cape Town and surrounding farms while many starved to death in the Eastern Cape. A new generation of missionary educated African intellectuals looked for alternative platforms, outside of the ‘traditional’ courts, to respond to some of the atrocities that befell Africans, but also to voice out their concerns, dreams, and hopes for the society they believed they deserve. Indaba, a bilingual newspaper, became a platform where they expressed at least some of these concerns, although under missionary editorship constraints. This paper revisits accounts of political power and authority by Tiyo Soga, between 1862-1865. It turns to indigenous concepts such as khonza (with popular translations such as “service”) and its shifting meanings around this period. It argues that through the externally derived technologies of literacy and print culture, even when they were heavily controlled by missionaries, we can read how African intellectuals were theorizing on political power and authority. As the humanities and the arts in Africa takes a sharp turn of recalibrating and reclaiming African epistemologies, I argue here that attentiveness on vernacular concepts emanating on the African continent and how they were deployed by African intellectuals, like Tiyo Soga, in early vernacular newspapers is therefore critical in understanding the institution on African people in their own terms.
Biography: Sanele kaNtshingana is a lecturer in African Language Studies in the University of Cape Town’s School of Languages and Literatures. His research examines how 19th- and early 20th-century isiXhosa-speaking intellectuals conceptualized and navigated shifting political authority. Through an analysis of the internal logic and vernacular concepts in the works of thinkers like Gciniswa Noyi, Tiyo Soga, William Wellington Gqoba, John Tengo Jabavu, and S.E.K Mqhayi, his work sheds new light on political argumentation and theoretical currents in African intellectual discourse.
If you are in Cambridge/Boston, we encourage you to join us in the Seminar Room at the Center for African Studies. If you are joining us virtually, please register here on Zoom.
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