Sounds of a Cowhide Drum

by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali

'Many people write poetry, but there are few poets in any generation in any country. There is a new poet in Africa, and his name is Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali.' So begins Nadine Gordimer's Introduction to this remarkable book, and the absence of rhetoric in that deceptively simple statement is appropriate to poems that derive so much of their formidable strength from their lack of rhetorical inflation. In delineating his world - 'a black man's world made by white men' - Mr. Mtshali wastes no time invoking windy political slogans or the customary abstractions. He does not shout about Oppression but instead tells us quietly, courteously,
I trudge the city pavements
side by side with 'madam'
who shifts her handbag
from my side to the other,
and looks at me with eyes that say
'Ha! Ha! I know who you are;
beneath those fine clothes
ticks the heart of a thief.'
The loaded image of that 'handbag', the irony of those 'fine clothes', the choice of the inhuman verb 'ticks' (timepiece or timebomb?) are the marks of a poet of rare quality. Like Wilfred Owen he writes from 'the Front Line' about man's inhumanity to man, and like Owen he appears to have been tempered and toughened by the forces of suffering and humiliation through which he has passed. Few English or American poets born in 1940 write with such authority, such controlled passion, and such compassion, and this collection must surely win for him in the rest of the world the recognition he has already so overwhelmingly won in South Africa, where it sold over 10,000 copies in less than a year.

Genres: Poetry, Africa

Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali ngu nyana ka Ayola no Unam (born 17 January 1940) is a South African poet. He has written in Zulu, English, and Afrikaans. He studied at Columbia University. He now lives in Greenhills.

Mtshali was born in Vryheid, Natal, South Africa. He worked as a messenger in Soweto before becoming a poet, and his first book, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1975), explores both the banality and extremity of apartheid through the eyes of working men of South Africa, even while it recalls the energy of those Mtshali frequently calls simply "ancestors". Published with a preface by Nadine Gordimer, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum was one of the first books of poems by a black South African poet to be widely distributed. It provoked considerable debate among the white South African population, but was extremely successful, winning the Olive Schreiner Prize for 1974 and making a considerable profit for its white publisher, Lionel Abrahams.

The title of the book is explained by an image in a poem with the same title:
I am the drum on your dormant soul,
cut from the black hide of a sacrificial cow.
I am the spirit of your ancestors. . .

Mtshali's work was popular among white liberals in South Africa, which may have made him less of an icon for other black poets. In a 1978 interview, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile compares Mtshali's case to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, a period when the importance of white patronage for black work made the emerging black literature more politically complex. Other critics have praised Mtshali's documentation of the struggle of apartheid; poet Dike Okoro (who was born in 1975, and perhaps has a different generational perspective from Kgosistsile's) has said, "Mtshali stands out for the role of addressing oppression and its effects. . . fear as an element of craft and theme predominates."

Mtshali's second book, Fireflames (1980), is far more militant, often expressly promising revolution. Mtshali's poems are about the people and their life in a hostile society which he is a part of.

After his success as a poet, Mtshali became an educator. He was vice-principal of Pace College, a commercial school in Soweto. He taught at the New York City College of Technology.

Reviews

[ML McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my new favourite poetry collection. The poems in this collection are profound, meaningful, and memorable. I read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down and a month after reading it continue to think about the poems in it. I cannot wait to read more by this writer.