“Untitled” by Dumile Feni, courtesy of the Dumile Feni Estate.
uHlanga is proud to announce the release of Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women, edited by Sono Molefe.
A book four decades in the making. The first South African edition of a Struggle classic, once published, re-published and translated throughout Europe, but banned by the apartheid regime – a book in and of exile.
In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in ANC camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted – released in the early 1980s by Swedish, Danish and German publishers and anti-apartheid solidarity movements – was unsurprisingly banned by the apartheid regime. Half-forgotten, it has never appeared in a South African edition – until now.
Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa’s liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.
It is a book of collaboration and homecoming, a point underlined by an artwork we are proud to be able to put on the cover. Dumile Feni – one of South Africa’s greatest artists despite the difficult and exploitative conditions in which he worked – contributed a number of illustrations to the second German edition of Malibongwe. These works were until recently unknown to Feni scholars, and even his own family. uHlanga managed to recover copies of the images to add to the archive of known Feni works. In return, Feni’s estate graciously negotiated permission for us to reprint one of his most powerful images on this edition’s cover.
In her new introduction to the book, Makhosazana Xaba argues that “The political and the literary are not mutually exclusive, and should not be treated as such.” Indeed, Malibongwe is a product of the concurrent forces of art and politics that propel the work of activists in times of war and struggle. And it’s as true now as it was in the 1980s: “Poetry has always raised morale,” writes Mabuza (as Sono Molefe) in Malibongwe’s original 1982 foreword, “giving impetus and emotional stimuli and dimensions to political content. Through this cultural medium [of poetry], political consciousness has been elevated in many.”
uHlanga hopes to continue this tradition through this new edition of a forgotten classic. The project to bring the book to South African audiences was spearheaded by Dr Uhuru Phalafala of Stellenbosch University, and was financially supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr Phalafala also contributes a new preface, outlining some of the book’s publishing history. This, alongside Xaba’s introduction and Molefe’s original foreword, may be found on the book’s page on our website, along with publication information.
The book is available now through bookstores in South Africa and Namibia, distributed by Protea Boekhuis, and is available overseas through the African Books Collective.