Announcing Peach Country, the debut collection by Nondwe Mpuma

We are proud to announce the publication in April 2022 of Peach Country, the debut collection by Nondwe Mpuma.

This slim volume should not be underestimated. With dreamy cover art from Shakil Solanki, our first release of 2022 will take you on an equally dreamy journey through landscapes of tornado-stricken villages, mythical beings, and the eternally evanescent promise of love.

Grounded by understated and precise verse, Mpuma weaves together the spiritual and the natural with effortless, imagistic flair. In Peach Country there is celebration, mourning, meditation, prayer, exploration, impatience and joy; throughout, however, Mpuma maintains an open-eyed wonder at the entirety of existence, viewed from her particular, and particularly enchanting, corner of the world.

Photo by Sanelisiwe Ndlovu

Nondwe Mpuma was born in 1995, in Lubaleko, emaXesibeni, on the rural plains of the Eastern Cape. A Mellon Mays Fellow during her undergraduate studies, Mpuma has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Western Cape, and is currently a lecturer at the same institution.

The winner of the 2017 Patricia Schonstein Poetry in McGregor Award, Mpuma has been published widely in South Africa and abroad. (Including in the previous uHlanga collection Cutting Carrots the Wrong Way). She is currently one of the organisers of The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Society, based in Cape Town, where she lives.

Peach Country will be available from April 2022 in all good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, and printed on demand overseas from the African Books Collective. Distribution in Southern Africa is done by Protea Distribution. Bookstores and other retail may order from Tamsin Doubell at 021 699 850, or orders@proteadistribution.co.za.

Detail from “Silly Little Fool, Anything Could Happen (!)”, by Shakil Solanki




Dr Lindiwe Mabuza, poet, editor and ambassador, 1938–2021

At the end of yet another difficult year, I was greatly saddened to hear of the death of Dr Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, on 6 December 2021. She was 83.

Many people and organisations – far more important than uHlanga, and far more intimately involved with Dr Mabuza’s life and work – have left tributes since her death. I have never suffered the death of an author before, and I have found it tremendously difficult to address, but I shall try nonetheless.

I was privileged enough to work with Dr Mabuza during the project which saw uHlanga, in collaboration with Dr Uhuru Phalafala and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, re-release Malibongwe, a book of poetry written by South African women, who were chiefly in exile during the Struggle. Mabuza, working under the nom de plume Sono Molefe, had commissioned, collated and edited the original book, which was eventually published under the banner of the ANC throughout Europe in the 1980s, and which we eventually brought out in its first South African edition last year.

We have not just lost a great South African, but a great poet, editor, organiser, journalist, freedom fighter, and, eventually, ambassador for the democratic nation that her life’s work helped to bring into being. A life such as hers can’t be encapsulated in a pithy statement. Our democracy was, as she prophetically wrote in the original foreword to Malibongwe in 1982, “a victory no power on earth can deny the people of South Africa”. May you rest peacefully in your victory, Dr Mabuza.

I would like to send my condolences to Dr Mabuza’s family and friends in this painful time.

–NM

Poetry London reviews Musawenkosi Khanyile and C.J. Driver

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As part of Poetry London’s landmark 100th issue, Canadian-Scottish poet Tarn McArthur has written a glowing review of Musawenkosi Khanyile’s All the Places and C.J. Driver’s Still Further: New Poems 2000–2020.

McArthur writes that “Musawenkosi Khanyile casts a dappled light on his country’s rural, township, and urban livelihoods to unveil how a society’s fragmented state is mirrored in the psyches of those who suffer its social and economic stratification.”

About Driver: “As with many whose personal histories have been scarred by civil strife and sacrifice, a part of what sustains the self within these poems is the solidarity found amongst friends and family, along with a sustained devotion to those who have passed away.”

The full review may be found here.

Announcing Ilifa by Athambile Masola and Unam Wena by Mthunzikazi A. Mbungwana – iincwadi zethu zokuqala ngesiXhosa!

uHlanga are proud to announce the publication of our first two books ngesiXhosa, Ilifa by Athambile Masola and Unam Wena by Mthunzikazi A. Mbungwana.


Publishing in isiXhosa is something we’ve always wanted to do, and finally we are bringing out two books of original, contemporary imibongo yesiXhosa by two fantastic young talents.

Athambile Masola is perhaps best known as a writer of essays, but in Ilifa, her debut collection of poems, she freely and fruitfully explores the realities of love, morality and pleasure in a dangerous world.

Unabashedly modern in style and contemporary in her outlook, Masola looks with fresh eyes at the ways in which South Africans’ freedoms are still restricted by their circumstances – particularly by poverty and widespread abuse against women. Equally, however, these poems extol the possibility of healing through allowing one to listen to oneself.

Masola gifts us with an isiXhosa that is written as it is spoken – as a language that is urban, alive, and a reflection of the time and place we live in; a society in which freedom continues to be conditional.

© Nonzuzo Gxekwa

© Nonzuzo Gxekwa

Masola, descended from amaGcina and amaBhele, grew up in East London. A Mandela Rhodes Scholar, Masola researches the literary careers of historically ignored black women writers.

She is the founder of Asinakuthula Collective, as well as a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Cape Town. Her work has been published widely in journals, newspapers, and online. This is her first collection of poems.

(Funda le nkcazo ngesiXhosa apha.)

Mthunzikazi A. Mbungwana is also no stranger to South African literature, having self-published her first chapbook Umnikelo in 2015. In Unam Wena, however, she reaches new levels, developing her style with a loaded winsomeness that has no parallel in modern isiXhosa poetry. With a remarkably poised voice, Mbungwana makes poems that are as assertive when they are explicit as when they are subtle.

Here is no easy comfort about love’s lasting ramifications, nor the sometimes tender but ultimately stifling idea of home. Nevertheless, Mbungwana captures the giddy ramblings of a desirous heart, as well as delving into the weighty histories of familial love and scandal, brandishing an isiXhosa that is both deeply literary and gloriously vital.

With poems that echo out into each other, and lines insistently rooted in their imagery, Mbungwana finds a way through the eternal and internal contest between the opposing forces of glory and pain, in the process making her own mark in a long and proud poetic tradition.

© Oz

© Oz

Mbungwana is a part-time teacher in the Creative Writing Department at Rhodes University, where she also received a Masters in Creative Writing in isiXhosa. Her writings focus on themes of home, dreams, and everyday black queer life.

Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, such as New Contrast, Atlanta Review, Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets 2008–2018, and To breathe into another voice: A South African Anthology of Jazz Poetry. She was born in Upper Indwe, Cala.

(Funda le nkcazo ngesiXhosa apha.)


Civil disturbances and other events of national disruption aside, both books will be available from the first week of August in all good bookstores in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. They are distributed to those bookstores by Protea Boekhuis Distribution.

Outside of South Africa, all of our books are available through the African Books Collective.