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
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
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.