Abstract

Published almost exclusively in the multilingual Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu during the 1920s, Nontsizi Mgqwetho's poetry is enmeshed with the racial and industrial politics of her time and place. Despite its denunciations of the colonial state and vehement calls for black unity and activism, her work is complicated by its publication in a newspaper sponsored by the Chamber of Mines. Coercive tactics of labour procurement, enacted at a legislative level, were reinforced through emerging discourses that shifted responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of African laborers to laborers themselves. This article investigates Mgqwetho’s forceful political poetry and its intersection with both the racist labor policies of her times and the discursive power of Umteteli Wa Bantu. It argues that in linking her religious and political convictions with the social anxieties of her times, Mgqwetho’s work offered the ford through the era’s turbulent political waters that she and her contemporaries called for.

Dr McGiffin is a Research Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa at the University of Ghana and a Lecturer at the University of British Columbia. Her research in the environmental humanities spans postcolonial ecocriticism, extractivism, and arts-based activism in West Africa, South Africa, and British Columbia. She has held fellowships at York University and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Later this year she will begin a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College London.