Women’s Everyday Genres: Another Look

UMntwana (Princess) Magogo, artist and member of the Zulu royal house, was interviewed by David Rycroft in the 1960s about composition (Rycroft Reference Rycroft1975a, Reference Rycroft1975b). She begins with lullabies and moves through songs of adolescent play, courtship, and then of marriage itself. The genres are numerous and some center on the voice of the bride, others amplify songs that would be sung by the women of her husband’s home. Not only does the princess evoke a sense of a public that knew and worked with the songs she described, but she also evokes a sense of communities that sang to give meaning and ceremony to the different stages of life, and the rituals of moving from one stage to the next. The interview—with its meticulous transcriptions, translations, and musical texts—is a way of bringing to life, evoking a world that is filled with song. Her work is now widely available beyond its original setting and, as we argue further on, pivotal to the reemergence of women’s genres and performance in the 1970s.

As Kholeka Shange notes of photographic images of uMntwana Magogo “what the ear ‘hears’ is the story of many” (Shange Reference Shange2020, 98). Rycroft’s interview with her in “Music in Zulu Life” allows us, likewise, to “hear” the music of many lives and generations in song. UMntwana Magogo’s account in a way that is like, but different from a photographic image, throngs with people, with their voices, dances, and bodily presence. Particular songs are for different age groups coming together and one song, sung by the older girls with married women also present and where beer had been brewed, goes like this:

The account configures in sonic and somatic ways moments that move towards the ceremonies linked to marriage. We gain a sense from later songs that she recounted or played, of what marriage might be like; that it won’t be easy. At the same time, such songs voiced by women sit comfortably in her repertoire with an account of the music sung at a royal hunt and with a solemn royal ihubo (anthem) sung at a royal burial, in this instance that of uMntwana Magogo’s grandfather, King Cetshwayo. What we wish to pick up on is how easily the affairs of the generations sit within a larger narrative, framed or rounded off with the death of the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo. Yet the subject of wars and linear history is not central to her account. It has its own holistic quality of “music in Zulu life.”

We take the above song as an example of how a range of genres may shift over time, are fluid, interactive, a factor uMntwana Magogo acknowledges at moments in her account. What we foreground in our essay is that daily life has its own genres and these need to be seen as in some way dialogic with the genres usually associated with public space. We argue that in the case of the Zulu and Xhosa archives there has been, across early Black intellectual histories in the twentieth century and across the writing of some of the first academics to consider Black cultural production in the 1970s and 1980s, an excess of attention on the iibongo/izibongo of eminent men. This has obscured the coexistence of a larger domain of linked poetry and song, a domain of performance that has always existed in a close inter-relation with iibongo/izibongo. We need to ask how iibongo/izibongo sit within a larger arc of cultural production and we suggest that the genres and domain of performance with which they need to be linked, is that of the quotidian and the multiple voices of women.

After Conquest: Elite Pacts, Print Culture, and Women’s Voices

In the nineteenth century, what is now the province of KwaZulu-Natal was growing powerful under a rapidly consolidating Zulu polity. To the west were the less powerful but well-established Xhosa-speaking polities of the province that is now the Eastern Cape. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, loosely connected and politically distinct chiefdoms like the Xhosa, the Thembu, the Mpondomise, and the Mpondo gradually incorporated smaller chiefdoms. The western regions of the Eastern Cape experienced colonialism first, while the Mpondo, in the eastern part of this region, and the Zulu, experienced colonial subjugation much later, towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although subsequently these regions have operated as, and have been considered as historically distinct, they share languages and practices that have a common precolonial origin. In fact, in the nineteenth century there was a considered colonial and largely mission-driven attempt to standardize isiZulu and isiXhosa into one language, in a way that understood a future for this zone that collapsed ethnic distinction (Arndt Reference Arndt2022).Footnote ³

By the end of the nineteenth century, in a process that began with a formal loss of African political authority from the 1860s, particular occlusion of women’s genres may have begun. To bring formerly self-ruling polities easily and most expeditiously under control, colonial officials turned to indirect rule bargains with royal elites, an arrangement common and manifest across most of colonized and colonizing sub-Saharan Africa. Colonial officials, who cleaved to Christian, Western understandings of gender, including a separation of spheres based on binary understandings of gender, paid little attention to different and local arrangements of gendered power, while few career colonial officials had any interest in cultural practices or forms, except to use them as evidence for barbarism. Chiefly elites, whose hold on authority had been rendered exceedingly tenuous by colonialism, were not motivated to share what little power remained to them by reminding colonial officials that women might also hold political authority.Footnote ⁴ In support of their receding and tenuous authority under settler control, chiefs and kings and their supporters emphasized the cultural narratives and forms that legitimated them best.

Despite this, the memory of women leaders never entirely faded, and at possibly inconvenient times, reasserted itself. One such moment can be found in the account of the historian Socwatsha kaQwabe to James Stuart of the power of Mkabayi, aunt of King Shaka (Stuart et al. Reference Stuart, de B. Webb and Wright2014, 96; Shamase Reference Shamase2017).

Rearrangements in structures of power had an impact, not just politically, but also across everyday life, across the ways in which people understood and articulated the changes they saw around themselves. Oral genres reflected these shifts directly, eloquently, and in multiple ways, often in the words of the first and second generation of African men to convert to Christianity. In William Wellington Gquoba’s 1885 epic, Ingxoxo enkulu nge Mfundo / A great debate on Education, he narrated the colonial destruction of people’s homes:

Already in 1885, Gqoba was aware not just of the consequences of colonialism, but connected shifts in the convening of audience. The great debate inhabits a mission school form, two opposing sets of student interlocutors, and a student audience. Gqoba, like others of his generation, located this poem in a vastly changed context. Karin Barber has detailed the impacts of this shift in audience and how it affects the public that convene to listen, to hear, and then to read (Barber Reference Barber2007). This was a more diffuse consequence of colonialism, related to changes in the understanding of the public sphere, of the prominence of certain genres, of the audiences available to listen and comment and sing.

But Gqoba’s work also foretells a sequence of events, a history of trauma and tumult experienced by Africans whose families were broken apart as men left their homesteads in Kwa-Zulu Natal and the Eastern Cape to work on the mines in Kimberley and Johannesburg, or on the docks in Durban and Cape Town, or to move into other areas of industry—cycles of cultural production and performance were significantly changed. By the early twentieth century, many performances were occurring outside of their historic audiences. During the 1930s, large numbers of Black women had joined Black men across South Africa’s urban areas. By the 1950s, most men of working age were away for long periods of time, some permanently. This changed the nature of audiences available for the performance of the everyday genres. As rural audiences and performers of women’s genres contracted, but by no means disappeared (see below on Zulu performers), urban audiences expanded. But these were audiences with different expectations and, often, a preference for different genres, like the choral music repertoires and hybrid musical styles present in the early performance of isicathamiya (Coplan Reference Coplan1985; Erlmann Reference Erlmann1999). Choirs and often multi-instrumental bands performed in front of increasingly cosmopolitan spectators, where people paid to hear their favourite performers, and whose activities featured in the Black newspapers of the period. The homestead audiences available to listen to the songs and poetry and narratives of daily life were impacted by this, not only in terms of the diminished size of audiences as so many men were increasingly absent for longer contracts, but also in terms of the valuing of different cultural forms.

An associated shift was occurring because of the expansion of a print-based literary culture in South Africa (Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2004). The move from oral to written, from performance to page, from communal creativity to individual author, marks another step in the forgetting of women’s voices and their power to shape discourse. The opportunities available to African men to write and publish were much more extensive than those available to African women. And African men welcomed this opportunity, especially in the recording of histories then passing from memory (Peterson Reference Peterson, Attwell and Attridge2012). For many, like John Henderson Soga, the accelerated breakdown of social forms familiar to them, and the attempted imposition of a Western-styled separation between men and women, had an impact on how they wrote history. In Soga’s epic account of the origins of the south-eastern Bantu, none of his genealogies reflect or recall the several significant women who ruled some of the Xhosa-speaking polities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Soga Reference Soga1930; Erlank Reference Erlank, Nuttall and Hofmeyr2024). Soga and the others who wrote in this fashion often drew their source material and inspiration from gatherings of older men and the praise poetry they encountered, elevating in their writing public forms of oratory over the more private space and collective artists of the homestead and the fireside. Significant women and also the everyday genres faded from sight at least until later in the twentieth century. We refer to these as cycles of occlusion, because the occlusion of women’s oratory did not happen once, but happened several times. Likewise, and for the power of our argument, others (often women) have always sought to make women’s voices heard.

Our example of remembering and forgetting centers on the figure of Queen (iNdlovukazi) Mkabayi, referred to above. In eighteenth-century KwaZulu, Mkabayi was Senzangakhona’s sister, aunt of King Shaka, and the regent of his youth. She is remembered through the nineteenth century, although she is largely subsequently forgotten. A portrait of her comes from the oral historian Socwatsha KaPhaphu Qwabe, who spoke on many occasions to the collector of Zulu oral testimonies and izibongo, the colonial officer and linguist, James Stuart. Socwatsha Qwabe twice paints Mkabayi, as a woman, an imbongi, and a wielder of political power. In 1904 he mentions a woman relative of his, Tangayi, who is an imbongi and adds, “she is like Mkabayi who carried a shield” (Stuart et al. Reference Stuart, de B. Webb and Wright2014, 96). In 1913, giving his version of King Shaka’s assassination, Socwatsha speaks as if he had been present; the account is precise, cinematic. It radiates power and ruptures any stable idea of gender and male authority. Why was Mkabayi “forgotten”? Was it because, in the eyes/hands of those who made the historical narrative, she simply did not fit the scripted gender/culture singularity that began to emerge?

Not only was literary culture in early twentieth-century South Africa more easily accessed by Black men than Black women, but men often used the medium of print to express their discomfort at gendered upheaval. Peter Mtuze (Reference Mtuze1990) identified this as a reason for the discomfort that many authors in the first two decades of the twentieth century showed towards women. Unease with a new gendered order, and what we would call an imbalance of voice, found expression across prose and poetry from KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape: women were neglecting their traditional roles in favour of more modern ones, abandoning the land and marriages cemented with lobola for loose and more sexually free urban relationships (Erlank Reference Erlank2022). Blind to women as producers of literary culture, they paid little attention to the voices of women who would have formed prominent parts of their own childhood, voices key to the everyday genres. As nascent literary figures their own fragile status was hard won in the face of a critical and oppositional set of white gatekeepers. This, in our view, is a key reason why women as figures of authority and women’s creativity failed to gain wider public traction in this crucial period.

To emphasize our point, acclaimed Xhosa imbongi, the “poet of the nation,” S.E.K. Mqhayi (Reference Mqhayi2009), published his izibongo extensively in print, in early Black newspapers like Izwi Labantu, and Umteteli wa Bantu. He had a national audience for his poetry, a larger audience than his public performances could convene. His facility with the written word meant that it was people like him—male African converts rather than female—who found their work published. In 1909, the year before the Union of South Africa, after two decades of upheaval including the annexation of the Transkeian Territories to the Cape Colony, the cattle epizootic known as the rinderpest, and the South African War, he outlined a series of calamities, evidence of a topsy-turvy social order:

That women could give orders to men and sons control their fathers, were disastrous developments, even to so sympathetic an observer as Mqhayi. In this instance, he was echoing a larger conversation in literary circles around dislocation that Mtuze (Reference Mtuze1990) recognized above, that we now know was related to anxiety around the dislocating and disruptive and tragic effects of colonialism, but which were articulated as a discomfort with women’s authority. The assault on the space of the family is central to his discomfort, but he does not acknowledge the space and weight of the domestic genres.

Mqhayi, who performed his works extensively, was part of a larger sphere of praise poets in the Eastern Cape. These circles, and their audiences, recognized that only men could be iimbongi (Kuse Reference Kuse1979; Opland Reference Opland1983). Yet there were powerful exceptions, in particular the imbongi of newsprint, Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Brown Reference Brown2004; Masola Reference Masola2020; Bikitsha Reference Bikitsha, Magoqwana and Magadla2024; Mkhize Reference Mkhize2026). In 1920 she had announced her arrival in the pages of Umteteli Wa Bantu , which had recently begun publication in Johannesburg. In “Chizama the Poet,” she reflected on the usual identification of praise poetry with men drawing on her experience—in 1920—of its historic practice:

Mgqwetho, who often wrote combative poems, refers at moments to her early life in the Eastern Cape, where she would have learned at least some of the genres of song and dance that punctuated people’s lives.

Evidence of such performed sociality comes from another near-contemporary source, anthropologist Monica Hunter whose work populated a silence around women’s creativity. Her Reaction to Conquest (Hunter Reference Hunter1936) is full of reference to beer and beer drinking, and the ceremonies and other occasions that marked the passage of important life events. She writes about the kinds of events that Mgqwetho might have attended. The following extract from her book tells us several things:

For those concerned with the documentation of the everyday genres and the rituals of reproduction, Hunter’s interlocutor shows knowledge of these practices since the start of the twentieth century. Audiences were big, sometimes 300 at initiation gatherings when the father was known as a big man who supplied food lavishly, but the quote also references a fast-moving and shared, and with enthusiasm, set of dances, some coming from outside the district. This was dance, but dance was inevitably accompanied by song, including new songs (Hunter Reference Hunter1936, 370).

Hunter’s research is full of references to the daily rituals, but also the tales that people told one another, even the tales that women dared to tell during the day when tales were usually reserved for the night. Was this such a bifurcated world, people’s home lives and their political lives, that the dances and songs and tales that sustained the imaginative and generative lives of the former had no bearing on the latter? Certainly, political marginalization is not sufficient to explain the fading of women’s voices. Or to pose the question another way: had women’s voices faded (we know they had not) or did something shift in what Miles Larmer (Reference Larmer2021, 227) calls cultural curation? In other words, did some things go underground while other genres keep well above the surface because the dominant political and cultural fashions of the time demanded it? What, after all, does culture have to do with politics? One possibility is that in both the Zulu and Xhosa spheres of politics what mattered both to the colonized and colonizer was how to express power publicly. Praise poetry, as a highly political form of oratory could continue to mark out power, as a device of cultural authority even if it was power not fully acknowledged by those in government in the South African state. Praise poetry could say things publicly and at times, it suited the ruling powers of the state to allow the oratory of their conquered subjects to have some airing.

Women’s Songs and Poetry: A 1970s Pivot?

Nicholas Bhotomane’s point at the start is that genealogies and chronology matter. What are the genealogies of women’s voice and how are they remembered? Both Socwatsha Qwabe, the oral historian, and Monica Hunter, the anthropologist, documented women’s voices. In this section, we are interested in how the scholarly documentation—perhaps curation is a better term—of the everyday genres and women praise poets, is more evident after roughly 1950, and particularly evident by the 1970s. Here we are partly historiographical, but also necessarily selective of what emerge as significant points in our chronology.

More evidence of women’s creative voicing in moments of culture comes from another woman anthropologist’s work in the 1950s.Footnote ⁴ Women’s ceremonies and in particular the puberty and coming-of-age rituals and songs connected with the Zulu deity, the Princess/iNkosazana Nomkhubulwana were recorded in the 1950s and 1960s by Eileen Krige and her research assistant, Harriet Sibisi, as they worked in the north of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and in Umvoti district north of Durban (Krige Reference Krige1968). These songs have a counterpoint in the songs that women sang to warriors, when their regiments returned from battle, a reminder of how women’s role as public commentators worked. However, in this example, also of importance is recognizing women’s role as singers and performers, of songs that have a role in validating birth, procreation and the stages of a woman’s life as part of a wider moral order, their role as singers in rituals. Again, here, we stress inter-connectivity: a song or a body of songs could be part of voicing a wider presence, evoking a desired moral being seen as a part of a natural order.

Language in a ritual context—as Krige points out, drawing on Victor Turner’s work—often relates to power. She notes, referring to the sexually drenched nature of the young women’s songs, as they focus on sex and procreation, “the use of words, ideophones, symbols and gestures representing sex and reproduction thus are conceived of as having a compelling force; they put power into operation” (Krige Reference Krige1968, 178). What is of interest for our argument is that the songs sung in the udwa (menstruation) and umemula (coming-of-age) events represent another iteration of voice and presence on the part of women. This is not public performance in the sense that women singing to welcome the returning regiments may have been, but it is deep public knowledge, even though in the 1960s it may not have been widely acknowledged or practiced. In 2026 the umemula ceremony is still widely performed in Zulu-speaking parts of South Africa. The songs recorded by Krige and Sibisi may not still be used but the songs composed and sung by the young women who are age-mates and friends of the special girl are widely in use.

Krige’s work on women’s puberty songs is also picked up in Deidre Hansen’s doctoral thesis, which draws on her research in the Eastern Cape in the 1970s (Hansen Reference Hansen1981). Hansen focuses on music and musical arrangements, including songs for soothing babies, children’s songs, songs used by age categories such as young girls and young boys, songs sung after initiation, wedding songs, and five categories of beer songs (walking to the beer drink, at the beer drink etc.). While some of the others then working in the Eastern Cape, for example Jeff Opland, were focused primarily on men’s praise poetry, Hansen’s concern was to reveal the extent and corpus of Xhosa music. For each occasion that she described, her descriptions and words debated and shaped by performers after the singing, she documented how either men or women (more often women) sung, declaimed, and improvised spontaneously. As her informants and performers shared with her, all adults had the ability to sing and to compose, learnt from childhood through observation and practice. Music, according to her interlocutors, was recognized as a talent that arose socially; social factors helped to produce great musicians (Hansen Reference Hansen1981, 47). Some of her more frequent interlocutors are named, some of her performers are named, but many would have been part of the audiences and participants at the gatherings she attended. Like Monica Hunter’s work, her thesis documents a vast but also everyday range of creativity.

One of the categories her interlocutors described to her was the category of the songs sung during the performance of intsomi (Scheub Reference Scheub1975). In 1968 Harold Scheub undertook the first of many arduous trips across the Eastern Cape to document and report the poetic and storytelling practices of Xhosa-speakers; later he archived his collection at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, where large parts of it have now been digitized.Footnote ⁵ His interests ranged more widely than those of some of his contemporaries, like Jeff Opland who was principally concerned with praise poetry. Scheub, though not always writing about oratory, captured the vibrance and creativity present in both male and female performance (Scheub Reference Scheub1996). He was particularly interested in the important voices of the quotidian present in storytelling and storytellers who, in the Eastern Cape were largely women (often also in KwaZulu-Natal, where they are known as izinganekwane ). The intsomi is known to its audience by a central, key metaphor, repeated several times around which the performer weaves her account. Tales are not uninterrupted narratives although they may have single narrators of some quite considerable renown. Singing, and shifts in how a song was performed, were often used to emphasize a shift in the tale, sometimes to mark a warning for one of the tale’s protagonists. Scheub’s descriptions and his interlocutors, like the famous storyteller Nongenile Zenani (Zenani and Scheub Reference Zenani and Scheub1992), are eloquent on the co-constitutive tension that exists between a performer and her audience.

While Scheub and Hansen, an oral historian and an ethnomusicologist, were working in the Eastern Cape, other scholars were also documenting the way in which Zulu women as artists, instrumentalists, and commentators were solidly part of the DNA of Zulu culture in its great variety. Liz Gunner, an author of this paper, has been active in foregrounding women’s voices since the 1970s, and (comment by her coauthor) her insights presented here are part of a process of cultural curation that began nearly fifty years ago. Through her work, along with evidence gained from women performers, a picture emerges of genres central to the canon of women’s cultural production. Some, but by no means all, were love songs and their length varied considerably. They were played on a number of stringed instruments, principally the ugubhu and umakhweyane but also the mouth-resonated bow, the isithontolo (Joseph Reference Joseph1987; Impey Reference Impey2018). Some were also iimbongi.

Our example here, and someone whose work was pivotal in reemerging women as artists of significance, is uMntwana Magogo, famous as a musician, often framed as a singular phenomenon rather than as a woman who provided a window into the lives, songs, and generations of other women singers and poets (Rycroft Reference Rycroft1975a, Reference Rycroft1975b; Shange Reference Shange2020). Her authority came from her capacity to redraw, or “rescript” as Shange (Reference Shange2020) notes, and set women as artists of the everyday as well as grand moments in African society. She was an imbongi (Gunner, Reference Gunner1979), but more important, she was an artist who recreated the genres of the everyday, the small women’s genres that networked and more than that, was in dialogue with the large genre of praise poetry and modified its self-standing loneliness. Her oeuvre is a constant reminder of the interlocking of voices both in the past time that her recorded testimonies recall but also in real time.

UMntwana Magogo serves as a bridge between male and female worlds in KwaZulu-Natal and subverts the divide between public and private that—although not the case before—had become part of African life by the early twentieth century. Her songs could evoke moments in a sweep of history and often they invoked the presence of women. For instance, a song sung by young women as the Zulu regiments came to the royal palace, showed how song played out in the public space at important moments of state, namely a monarch receiving his army.

Magogo’s voice also intervened in public space through the medium of radio in the 1970s and 1980s. Even if vying for space on Radio Zulu with the praise poetry of rulers favored by the South African Broadcasting Company mandarins and their support for white rule, her songs and voice were strongly present at the time, and even subsequently. Evidence of this comes largely from women’s memories. One listener on whom she had a formative influence was the singer, Tu Nokwe, who heard her as a young girl in KwaMashu, Durban. Tu Nokwe, in a later interview, cited Magogo’s influence, in particular the love song, “Helele, ngibambeni Omame/ Wamuhle le nsizwa. / Ah, Hold me my Mothers/ He was handsome that boy” in her album with the Black Angels, Inyakanyaka, in 1996 (Gunner, Reference Gunner2024). In the post-1994 era the song of love and loss also found its way into high culture in the 2002 opera “Princess Magogo” sung by Sibongile Khumalo (Mhlambi, Reference Mhlambi2015).

But in the 1980s, radio was still double edged. The state hoped to manipulate and dominate; praise poetry of rulers aired on Radio Bantu and later Radio Zulu and Xhosa Radio Xhosa could provide a semblance of power, an illusion of voice and influence.

The double-edged nature of radio, both to subvert but also to perform hegemony, is apparent in S.M. Burns-Ncamashe’s radio performance of U-Bazindlovu in 1977. Burns-Ncamashe, Gwali chief and traditionalist in the Ciskei, an apartheid Bantustan, was also a noted praise poet and historian of the AmaRharhabe Xhosa. His work is significant because of “how rarely women were mentioned in the genealogical tables of the ruling families” (Victor Reference Victor2021, 221). Nakapa ruled for Faku; Noposi acted for the imprisoned Gonya; Suthu acted for her uncircumcised son; Yese, the female mediator from Thenjini, Nogqolosa, acted for her brother; Ntusa ruled the Nlambe as a young woman (Mtumane Reference Mtumane2000, 321–32).Footnote ⁶

Burns-Ncamashe had sung these praises in an effort to refer his listeners to a pre-conquest past, comparing its glories to contemporary conditions and the evils of local rule under apartheid and referred to a nation, embodied in its female ruler, being torn apart because of the “politics of hyenas and wild dogs” (Mtumane Reference Mtumane2000; Victor Reference Victor2021).Footnote ⁷ Even when radio broadcasts made little space for women, the presence of women’s authority, while scant and not frequent, was apparent.

These kinds of performances, with wide listenership and by orators with a large, personal following, were not the only sources of state critique, though. The following song is about the wives of migrant workers left raising their families at home, and the social dislocation caused by apartheid and migrant labour:

David Dargie recorded this song multiple times in the mid-1980s. His interest was in the style of overtone ( umngqokolo ) singing, “to sing in a hoarse bass voice, producing the sound far back in the throat” (Kropf in Dargie Reference Dargie1991, 33). But his descriptions also are a testament to the tremendous skill, which umngqokolo practitioners learnt through observation and attention to a series of unspoken cues embedded in performances of the song (Dargie Reference Dargie1991, 37). Few women sang exactly the same lines, but all coordinated their singing to a similar range of movement, dancing, clapping, pulsing, pausing, and other bodily gestures to add to the song’s meaning. Women joined in the singing as they wished; Dargie observed performances that included anything from a few women to many; and on one occasion a performance included fifty women. Yet forms like this go largely unremarked because of their quotidian nature.

While the nature of the singing that Dargie recorded was (and is) particular to the Eastern Cape, its themes, which spanned apartheid and love affairs, were not. As Rosemary Joseph (Reference Joseph1987) worked in Mahlabathini and adjoining areas of what is now in the north of KwaZulu-Natal province in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she found a large body of similar songs, played on a musical bow held in women’s memories or still actively played, sometimes for themselves and in one instance, played by wives for their husband. As one group of singers remarked:

This last line is so evocative of expectations around audience. Singing and dancing and the telling of tales, returning also to the example of the intsomi, occurred in front of and together with audiences, but not always in a manner, as Joseph’s singers shared with her, that consciously sought audiences. Yet at the same time audiences were co-constitutive of performance, a fact well-established as part of other oral and performative repertoires in Africa (Barber Reference Barber1997, Reference Barber2007). This sharing of performance, to finish a day’s labour, or to celebrate a marriage, was part of how people lived, not necessarily always needing to be remarked upon. The efforts of the unnamed performers of iintsomi, the bow harp players, were highly valued, highly appreciated, but also, usually, unremarked upon.

So, the difference between these performances, of women’s bow songs in the KwaZulu-Natal and the overtone singing in the Eastern Cape, between what we know of izibongo/praise poetry versus what we know of song, becomes partly if imperfectly determined by the nature of the audience present and but also the disposition of those recording. The Eastern Cape owes a substantial debt to Jeff Opland, who has spent several decades investigating Xhosa poetry and writing. He began collecting izibongo in the 1970s, though his more recent work lies in an invaluable published collection of Xhosa literature (Opland Reference Opland1983; Mgqwetho Reference Mgqwetho and Opland2007; Mqhayi Reference Mqhayi2009, Reference Mqhayi, Opland and Mtuze2017). Opland’s work, while rich and important, has usually, in his focus on male iimbongi, ignored what women have and are able to contribute to creative production. Russell Kaschula, who has also since the 1990s written extensively on Xhosa-language poetry, refers to Opland’s works as a “literary intellectualisation” (Kaschula Reference Kaschula1993, Reference Kaschula2002, Reference Kaschula2017, 6). And so, to go back to one of our opening remarks, about the amplification of certain genres in South African public life, while Opland’s work on male praise poets has directed attention away from women’s writing, the others we have cited in this section were equally busy, though perhaps less visible, in documenting its presence.

Women and Power; Women and Poetry in Contemporary South Africa

Makhosazana Xaba and Athambile Masola are scholar-poets who have addressed the silences and misremembering of women in contemporary South Africa. They use their poetry and writing to challenge assumptions about women as artists (Masola Reference Masola2021; Masola and Guzula Reference Masola and Guzula2021; Xaba Reference Xaba2008, Reference Xaba2019). Yet Masola and Xaba struggled to find a publisher for their work on Noni Jabavu, daughter of the Eastern Cape and transnational African citizen, a fact perhaps emblematic of the difficulties faced by women addressing scholarly and cultural arenas often closed to them (Jabavu et al. Reference Jabavu, Xaba and Masola2023).

Two contemporary women poets carry through the voices of earlier izimbongi/iimbongi and those of the neglected poets of weddings and the songs of the small genres. Koleka Putuma’s (Reference Putuma2021) poetry assumes their mode of direct address. Often Putuma assumes a public stance, speaking for a community, a nation; this too is a mark of the imbongi. Like many Xhosa iimbongi—in either print or performance—she can be excoriating in her critiques. She claims the public space, here as a fierce exponent for women’s sexual and political rights in “On Black Solidarity”:

Other poems in the same collection assume an inner solitary voice, like the player of an instrument singing for consolation and self-healing. These too are part of a statement of women’s voices in a domain that is not cut into public and private, like Xaba’s poetry in Tongues of My Mothers (2008). Her poetry turns to history and demands new scripts that destabilize patriarchal master narratives and reposition powerful women, subverting the usual masculine subject of the praise poem and pulls women and their vitality into view:

Shange notes how the long timeline of the phrase “carried it through us” links uMntwana Magogo to “many Black women who lived during her time and beyond” (Shange Reference Shange2020, 59, 127). Each of these poets meld together the force of print and of oratory, and call for a new inclusivity of the sonic, and of women’s voices in history, and in the present.

Much of this poetry and many of these songs still circle back to those original themes. Their current iteration as wedding songs, coming of age songs—addressing the men of their age group, their mothers, mothers-in-law, friends, or simply speaking their mind in song—show the vibrant and ongoing making of women’s small genres also noted by Zondi (Reference Zondi2020) in her study aptly titled, Bahlabelelelani? Why Do They Sing? Gender and Power in Contemporary Women’s Songs.