Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Isizwe Esinembali: Xhosa Histories and Poetry (1873-1888)

Isizwe Esinembali: Xhosa Histories and Poetry (1873-1888)

Opland, Jeff
Opland, Jeff
Kuse, Wandile

Hardcover

Series: Publications of the Opland Collection of Xhosa Literature, Book 1

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1847014429
ISBN13: 9781847014429
Publisher: James Currey
Published: Dec 9 2025
Pages: 564
Weight: 2.00
Height: 1.25 Width: 5.91 Depth: 9.06
Language: English
Edition and translation of all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings in isiXhosa and English, with a comprehensive introduction

William Wellington Gqoba (1840-88) was prominent among the African intellectuals emerging in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa towards the end of the nineteenth century.

By trade he was a wagonmaker, licensed preacher of the Free Church of Scotland, teacher, historian, poet, folklorist and editor. For much of his brief life he served on mission stations as a catechist, and ended his career as editor of the Lovedale newspaper Isigidimi sama-Xosa, to which he contrived to contribute subversive poetry outspokenly critical of Western education, the European administration of black people and the discrimination suffered by colonised blacks. Gqoba fashioned the figure of the Xhosa man of letters. Unrivalled in his time in the generic range of his writing, he was the author of letters, anecdotes, expositions of proverbs, histories and poetry, including two poems in the form of debates that stood for over fifty years as the longest poems in the Xhosa language.

This book assembles and translates into English all of William Wellington Gqoba's clearly identifiable writings. They offer an insider's perspective on an African nation in transition, adapting uncomfortably to Western mores and morality, seeking to affirm its identity by drawing on its past, standing on the brink of mobilisation to resist white control and to construct its social, political and religious independence of European colonialism.

University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Southern African Development Community

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