[caption id="attachment_55433" align="alignright" width="600"] Ademola Araoye[/caption] By Ademola Araoye “As the gods argued and debated, man waged war on earth... Nomkhubulwane, why have you set the homeless winds against us” You whose experience are richer than those of the gods, Grant that I may emulate you in your own search of truth Let me uproot my own preoccupation with my self image With the blessings of my fellow beings May I complete the ultimate goals of creation. Madam Mathabo Kunene, Thekwini Mayor: Her Excellency Cllr Gumede President of the IFP: Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi Minister of Arts and Culture: Mr Nathi Mthethwa Director of the Center for Creative Arts: Mr David Maahlamela Protocols and Salutation! Permit me to congratulate you, Madam Mathabo Kunene and the Mazisi Kunene Foundation for making this long awaited day a reality. The concrete eventuation of the original isiZulu version of Emperor Shaka the Great, UNODUMEHLEZI KAMENZI, is not only a landmark event in the history of Zulu culture and tradition, it is also an authoritative authentication of African philosophical traditions. Today’s events further puts a stamp of validation on the essences of black humanity. Through your exertions Mazisi Kunene has been enabled to take African cosmology a notch higher. You have assuaged his explicit regret that the English version was published before the original isiZulu manuscript. I am truly honored to be here on this special day and rejoice with you on this great occasion. Epo nbe, Ewa nbe o..... Let us reference him by his full appellation. Mazisi Raymond Fakazi Mngoni Kunene. He was born in this gracious city, Durban, on May 12, 1930 in what today is Kwazulu-Natal province of the Republic of South Africa. He was raised in Amahlongwa. These basic facts are of great salience in grounding or even unearthing the spirit being that Mazisi Kunene turned out to be. In fact, they are the very beginnings of why we today, just a decade after his passage on 11 August, 2006, gather in his honor to explore the implications of the burdens of his life for humanity. Yes, for humanity, and by implication for the proud Zulu nation, for Kwa-Zulu Natal, for South Africa, for Africa as a whole and black humanity in its entirety. All these because, instrumentalizing his Zulu heritage as a comprehensive alibi as no one else before him, Kunene was in the avant garde of the search for holistic emancipation of the black universe. But he is more than just that when situated in the global scheme of things. Events imposed by the combined forces oF the temporal, geo-political and cultural specifications of his birth constituted an unholy trinity of real life existential hazards that at once drove pervasive crippling domestic contingencies, and in reality what then seemed immovable exterminating externalities in the immediate and global universe of Mazisi Kunene. As a devoted apostle of the Ancestors, he also had to contend with the saintly constructive deconstruction of a deeply entrenched internalized culture of uninformed denigration of Zulu, and by implications, African cosmology by an obstinate ancient and pragmatic confraternity of earliest African intellectual victims of hegemonic intrusions. The epics Emperor Shaka The Great and the Anthem of the Decades are thus cosmic telepathies to both the living and the ancestors. They are, more importantly, monumental cathedrals erected to serve as institutional lighthouses in the redemption of a disoriented soul of Africa. It was therefore war on all fronts. As with all iconic prophets, that war was even so most pronounced after his return from exile to a topsy- turvy South Africa with all the opportunistic scrambling unleashed by the disorienting rambunctiousness in the air of freedom of the post settlement. In this climate, no good deed went unpunished in the life of Mazisi Kunene. These were factors that in withering the sanity of the ordained template of humanity, brought ruin to life as a whole. But as Kunene pointed out: things may seem destructive in subjective human terms, but in the overall scheme of things must be understood as creative. It is important for man to recognize this fact for his own survival and freedom. Therefore, when we gather today, it is a celebratory feast of a gratitude of his vindication in his spirit essence and presence. I thank Madam Mathabo Kunene and the Mazisi Kunene Foundation for the honor of an invitation to celebrate this giant of a spirit. The aforementioned broken template impeded or constrained individual life choices and in the final analysis directed the causes, courses and contortions of the life of Mazisi Kunene. This indeed applied to all the kindred comrades in the intellectual trenches before and immediately after him. This troubled context, predicated on an ascendant simplistic cognitive appreciations that drove a horrendous hegemonic order, directed in totality the hierarchical social and political order, horrific human relationships and the killing institutional landscape of this environment that impacted all. In effect, the construction and constrictions of the dolorous exterminating externalities also forced the nature of responses in the dedication to certain transcendental, transformatory and emancipatory causes that they generated for the victims. [caption id="attachment_66171" align="alignright" width="640"] Mangosutho Buthelezi, a Zulu leader, right and Madam Mathabo Kunene during the lecture[/caption] Mazisi Kunene was in the forefront of this tempestuous revolutionary ferment in mending the broken template of humanity in word and spirit. His battles rose above the mechanical firing of lethal bullets and the rationalized legitimacy of the insanity of hauling of mortars by the oppressed against the spiritually troubled and obscenely demented oppressor. The war was along multiple fronts: political, military, ideological, philosophical, spiritual, ideational, economic, physical all well encapsulated in a literary genre that sought to beam logical illuminations to the contradictions of life and death. His literary perorations acquire the character of wholly structured and integrated philosophical edifice. These many fronts, battles and dimensions of the war for self validation were won and lost. They were and are still intertwined. The war had been fierce. The decade before the birth of Mazisi Kunene had witnessed a ferocious intellectual schism on the pages of Umteteli wa Bantu news paper. The principal protagonists were Henry Selby Nsimang and R. V. Selope Thema. Intellectuals such Tiyo Soga and R. V. Selope Thema had challenged more progressive perspectives of Selby Nsimang that the Christian church and traditional metaphysical beliefs were predicated on similar, if not really the same historical principles. Consequently, the supposed superiority of the latter is actually a myth. Selby Nsimang’s thesis is that at a deep level, the ethical, philosophical, epistemological and metaphysical principles of African religion were no different from those characterizing Christianity and Islamic religions, hence the claim of a superiority of one particular religion over the other is unfounded. Finally Henry Selby Msimang affirmed that since religion is no more formula or conventionalism to be merely copied, imitated or assimilated, the destruction of African religion by Christianity has created a permanent crisis in the metaphysical and psychic structure of the African. A sense of restoration was needed to balance the dis-equilibrated universe of black humanity. The relevance of Kunene in this war is in the astute deployment of the phenomenon of Emperor Shaka to ground the philosophical precepts that had been denounced by many African intellectuals themselves who had come accept their own inferiority. Also, and probably more telling, is his explication of the basic assumptions of the Zulu cosmology in the Anthem of the Decades. He affirms, in this connection, that the Zulu cosmology is predicated on the existence and functioning of the physical and the non-physical entities. The harmony of two realms demonstrates a basic quality of the Zulu universe that is manifest in its duality. The duality is expressed through the balance of the two realms. Given this balance, the spiritual is thus not superior to the physical. Only god who is the source of all things is superior to all things. All the gods and the species of the universe are agents fulfilling the creative purpose of life. Accordingly, in the epics, Kunene is unending in breaking the boundaries of the horizons of the word, literarily, and in the reality of the wide world. The fundamentals of his major treatise are as salient today as they were when he set down these inspired epic songs. They have inestimable consequences for the continued vitality of the world and its humanity. Listen to his open verse in Emperor Shaka the great: Great anthem, by your power break the boundaries of our horizon Fill the wide expanse of the earth with your legendary songs Say then: people have power, people tear the garments of the night; By their feet, they scar the ground with new life. (A M A N D L A!!!!!) All hail! The celebrants of the feast have come! The Ancestors follow them Whispering: ‘A great festival is to be repeated again and again! Generation after generation comes here to play Here they are: our Forefathers. They rise from the mist Striding across the earth to nowhere, Calling the name that invokes the sacred one of the festival All hail to the trembling rivers of the afternoon. After the night has covered the earth Rouse us from the nightmare of forgetfulness So that we may narrate their tales. You will see them, the Forefathers, by the brightness of the moon You will see their great procession as they enter the mountain Eternally their anthems emerge. How can we be silent before the rising sun? How wonderful! We can sing the sacred son of our Forefathers By our ancient epics we are made beautiful It is clear that long before and after Mazisi Kunene as well as today the struggle for holistic emancipation that encompasses all dimensions of the physical, material and spiritual realms had been and has remained the enduring existential reality of black humanity in the longitudinal span of human history. Accordingly, the struggle for emancipation, implying identity validation, in its various expressions has remained the constant urgency and of a daunting immediacy of Black Earthlings in more contemporaneous times. The struggle, in practical terms, is a resistance to the vassalization of the identity of the black earthling. This has been the character of the ineluctable interactions since improved technological capacities led to he epochal rendezvous of all evolved humankind. The other war at all levels has been integrated into the main challenge of living as a black human. Mazisi Kunene accepted the historic challenge that made him a full philosopher-Generalismo in the other actual war of counter veiling ideas that was a full complement of the war of bullets and mortars. The two wars were interlinked, but conceptually distinct. There was the Umkhomto we Sizwe and its battles of lethal bullets on the physical and material planes. There is the real other war. This is the unending war of intellectual insurgency, more potent and enduring than the explosions of mortars and lethal fire, for the eternal validation of the ideational and spiritual authenticity of the essences of the black being. Kunene’s and the feathered brigades in the trenches of this war were and are still caught in the struggle for the continued validation of the essences of our humanity. These essences are built on the understanding of the great female creative force. Kunene elucidates that although the creative agents exist in Zulu belief, it is not defined in anthropomorphic terms. The most fundamental aspect of Zulu religion is the belief in the existence of the Supreme Creator. The Supreme Creator is said to be unknowable. Such unknowability is in itself a point of knowing as it defines a man’s position in the total scale of creation and postulates man’s own acceptance of his state of cosmic infancy. It is critical to highlight that the creative agents in Zulu mythology are associated with the forces of growth. Nomkhubulwane, the only daughter of God and giver of rich life, is the most clearly defined of all cosmic powers. It is to her that the community supplicates for water, in times of drought. Water, of course, is the font and sustenance of life. Water, im no get enemy! Water has no enemy, exclaims Fela Anikulapo Kuti- the late cultural activist and priest at the Shrine in Lagos. These seminal expressions of Kunene’s engagements are found in the huge epics of Anthem of the Decades and Emperor Shaka the Great, among the corpus of work growing by the day. An epic poem is a long, narrative poem that is usually about heroic deeds and events that are significant to the culture of the poet. Many ancient writers used epic poetry to tell tales of intense adventures and heroic feats. For Mazisi Kunene the epic, as a cosmic address to both the Ancestors and the living, also served as an armor and now are shining bayonets to disgorge imposed false narratives given the transcendence of their expansive temporality and rise above the material in scope. They also illuminate the understandings of the spiritual realm as projects in the heroics of a nation. While the almost coded canons and cadences of the incantations of the epics that were drawn from the classic genre of the Zulu Royal Shakain court were very utilitarian for the specificities of the immediate challenges at hand that ended with the negotiated settlement, more importantly they also rose above the existential and quotidian panics and traumas of the immediacy of their instigations. How monumental this transcendental yoke is has become the life burden of Madam Mathabo Kunene, who has to salvage every written word on every yellowing scrap of paper or cardboard scattered in the nooks and crannies of the Mazisi Kunene museum that used to be her home. Calling this Abami Eda-Spirit Being- by his full name is an invocation to the dizzying heights that his unfolding life’s works threaten, in spite of ourselves, to elevate us. Kunene highlights that spirits eventually complete their cycle. After many years of association with the community of the earth, they are then absorbed into the primordial cosmic power. And Kunene’s works fervently, surely and earnestly, still trickling in with every piece of yellowing note, rumpled covers of products, white paper, cardboard or even soft tissues normally consigned to the privacy of small rooms retrieved and salvaged from the commodes and nooks of Madam Mathabo Kunene’s home, suggest that the ever expansive unending splay of the harvest of Kunene’s works and in their constant exfoliations shall further ultimately liberate him. False. No, it shall only further set us free. For indeed, we are gathered here to celebrate the axiomatic truisms that underpin the constancy of the struggle, our sometimes frivolous and then mighty contestations, as the essence of life. Madam Kunene’s quotidian exertions of collating frayed and yellowing notes of lyrics is the reflection of the restlessness of a true Spirit Being, possessed of searing visions of poetic truths defying time and climes in their eternity and universality. The voice of th Ancients and Ancestors had to be heard. Kunene codifies Shaka’s encounter with Nqoboka Shaka: What strange thoughts occupy your mind? Why do you sit brooding in peace time? Nqoboka said: I am possessed by the voices of the Zulus The great congregations of the people are singing and talking; Their voices penetrate through to the Ancestral Spirits I feel their presence; I feel the presence of ancient heroes. Even those who wish us ill dare not speak!... Through the years our nation has seen many trials, Yet none has found us unprepared. By your wisdom the nation grows like an ancient tree And through you no winds, no storms, shall uproot this plant. The festival went unabated. The festival burst with pleasant songs The Ancestors heard the voices of their children; The embraced them and kissed their forehead When the High Priest had poured the purifying medicine He carried the sacred branch of the royal grounds He made a solemn prayer, calling the spirit of the Queen Mother....page 353.... In the above canons of communal wisdom, Mazisi transposes the world, not just the Zulu or us gathered here, to the converging height of a people’s temporal and spiritual planes. It is also the height of defiance in the circumstances of the era of hatred. It is the coded Amandla rendered in the voice of and with the authority of the Ancestors. Madam Mathabo Kunene, on behalf of Africa, I salute you!!! Mazisi Kunene’s legacy is multi-dimensional. There is the literary giant masquerade with not just an assured place, but a gangling presence in the cove of the blessed constellation of spirits of the land. He would be in the treasured company of SEK Mqhayi, John Langalibelele Dube, Pixley ka Iseme Seme, John Kush Ngubane, HIE Dhlomo, Benedict Wallet Villakazi, Gerald Sekoto, R V Selope Thelma and William Wellingotn Gqoba, among so many others to whom we pay tribute. There is also Kunene in asylum as the revolutionary activist in London. He was obviously also the restive teacher in Los Angeles, to which I arrived just as he was leaving in 1993. Our common brother and friend, who doubled as my benefactor, Ntongela Masilela, was passionate and never tired about the compelling task of preserving all the available and accessible elements of the intellectual history of South Africa. He was in the position to know and to unequivocally assert the special placement of Kunene in the global firmament. Yet, while the many disaggregated and atomistic appreciations of Mazisi Kunene have underlined the greatness of our spirit being, a more holistic situation of him elevates his life’s enterprise in revealing a salience well beyond the immediacies and specificities of his location. But they all, including his cherished comrades, lived in an uncertain and dangerous era characterized by great universal dichotomies and great denunciations of the presumed normative. There were no accommodations, except those made by the subject peoples to survive. It was a time of great strife for denunciations and subordination at all levels. And finally, more importantly, there is Mazisi Kunene, the great and unwavering disciple of the ancestors. The great apostle who decoded and proclaimed Their message of the uncompromising imperatives of our self appropriations in the Anthem of the Decades for our age and generations to come, is indeed the Kunene that I have come to address. He is the enigmatic architect of the undoubtedly futuristic challenge of holistic reconstruction of our black world and our singular universe toward a totalistic emancipation and revalidation of the complete universe and world of that black humanity. Apostle Kunene and The message have long been coming. The Global Context of Kunene’s Burden The first challenge we confront in the age of Mazisi Kunene is that humanity in its entirety was enveloped in a seeming incubus expressed in an era described as dominated by volatile ambivalence. Niall Fergusson calls the period between 1904 and 1953 the Age of Hatred. This had universal application manifest in the systemic turbulence with local variations in their expressions. The centrality of race in the age of hatred has been codified. Noting that even though race is not a genetically meaningful concept, Fergusson nevertheless observes that race has been such a powerful and violent preoccupation of modern times. He traces the first ostensible attempt to subdivide the human species to biologically distinct race to the Swedish botanist Carolus Linneaus (Carl von Linne). According to Ferguson: Linneaus, like all his many imitators, ranked the various races according to their appearance, temperament, and intelligence, putting the European man at the top of the evolutionary tree, followed by American man (ill tempered,...obstinate, contented, free), Asian man (severe, haughty, desirous) and invariably at the bottom-African man (crafty, slow, foolish). Whereas the European man was ‘ruled by custom, Linneaus argued African man was rule by caprice. These atrocious demarcations of fake science were not about ending. Ferguson advances further that by the end of the nineteen century, racial theorists had devised more elaborate methods of categorization, mostly commonly based on skull size and shape. In his own case, the English polymath Francis Galton developed a scale of racial intelligence that place ancient Athenians at the top and Australian aborigines at the bottom. These developments had implications for the ungodly trajectory of events in South Africa. Combining the fake science with the nudity of God, and with influences from German nationalist philosophers who rated the nation and the Volk as the highest ideals to strive for, South Africa was effectively locked in its path to its historic damnation and its human tragedy. By November 1960, Piet Meyer, who had begun a career in the Broederbond in the 1930s, when Mazisi Kunene was born, and seemingly had come to personify the encroaching separatist Christian Volk nationalism of the Afrikaner, had ascended the pinnacle of the Broederbond, a position that he held until April, 1972. The Broederbond gave traction to the hatredness of the age in South Africa. In this role, the Broederbond was the sheriff and shepherd that kept everyone in check. It subverted the normal workings of society. The Broederbond believed that its leaders were chosen by their nude god. It was a chairman of the Broederbond, Dr Andries Treurnicht, who as Deputy Minister of Bantu Education, issued the Afrikaans teaching decree that sparked the 1976 Soweto uprising. Christian Nationalism, the Doctrine of Predestination and the Nudity of God John Matisonn observes that Christian Nationalism in South Africa, drawing on Abraham Kuyper, rejected everything sane. This included the complex Zulu understandings of the creative force and the order of the universe that by linking social events with the cosmic beginnings and claiming for them a supernatural edict affirms the sanctity of the current social order. This order is clear that cosmic whims do not always coincide with the needs of human life. Christian nationalism also repudiated the rationalism of the French revolution and the key tenets of the Enlightenment that dethroned the thoroughly abused God constructed in the image of the frailties of a lost generation of Man and endowed in the soiled garments of Kings from political power and instead opened the way to the enfranchisement of the people to elect their representatives and participate in key decision making. He further notes that in South Africa, Christian Nationalism, drawing on Abraham Kuyper, rejected the 1789’s anti-God, anti-clerical, anti-Church challenge to the political power. It repudiated rationalism of the Enlightenment. The self imposed obligation of the Christian Nationalists was to attack other gods and doctrines of liberalism, communism, rationalism, materialism, and internationalism. One could also add to the litany the complete lack of comprehension of the notion of human dignity by the Christian nationalists. The Dutch Reformed churches propagate similar Calvinist beliefs and convenient doctrines that paradoxically assert that their very parochial God is indeed eternal, infinite, wise, and just, and in their fact book is the Creator of the universe. What a god!! [caption id="attachment_66173" align="alignright" width="640"] L-R: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a Zulu leader, his wife and Ademola Araoye [/caption] The tentacles of this their God is believed to have an ominously long reach: He is the architect of the life and the fate of each individual on earth. He saved his arbitrary “chosen” ones, on condition that they adhere to the teachings of their amorality spewed out on Sundays in their spiritually dilapidated cathedrals. Their warped interpretation of the Bible—both the Old Testament and the New Testament—is the final authority on religious matters. The implication was that the Afrikaner had been ordained by this evil God as a superior being to black humanity. Beyond the moral dead weight of its spiritual deficiency, Apartheid’s designers were top level Broederbonders with a single pervasive intellectual font that was based on the Dutch theorist, sometimes known as the ‘Calvinist pope’, Dr Abraham Kuyper. Religion had always been the most powerful formative influence in shaping the values, norms and institutions of Afrikaner community. Among the many sad ironies of life in South Africa, Susan Ritner affirms that perhaps none is more poignant than the role of the dominant Church of the Afrikaner people (the Nederduitse Gereformeeder Kerk). Afrikaners were one of a few in western societies whose values and customs were established by, and expressed through their church. She further highlights that it was the Church that insisted on the progressive sterner definition of separateness. It is then surmised that the local expressions of the global age of hatred in South Africa revolved around racial bigotry, the devaluation of God, the de-legitimation of the humanity of the Black being and the repudiation of fundamentals of the Enlightenment and its spirit. In this Christian Nationalism was predicated on predestination, exclaiming that God broke a threatening uniformity of humankind, provided the ideology of hatred, while the Broederbond ensured organizational traction. Amassing overwhelming state power, Matisonn notes that the Broederbond established dominant institution through which they converted other groups to Christian nationalism. It is critical to highlight Matisson’s observation, attributed to Bloomberg, that: All the key theoreticians...agreed that by suddenly breaking up people into language groups, God revealed his will that they should live in separate cultural-ethnic units. A confusion of tongues persist till the end of time, which meant that races, cultures, and nations would persist as discrete entities. The ideas of Abraham Kuyper drove these developments. A casual check on Abraham Kuyper yielded the following: Abraham Kuijper, (29 October 1837 – 8 November 1920), generally known as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch journalist, statesman and neo-Calvinist theologian. He founded the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (the second largest Reformed denomination in the country behind the Dutch Reformed Church), a newspaper, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the Anti- Revolutionary Party. He served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905. In religious affairs, he sought to adapt the Dutch Reformed Church to the challenges posed by the loss of state financial aid and by religious pluralism, rising nationalism, and the Arminian religious revivals of his day which denied predestination. He vigorously denounced modernism in theology as a fad that would pass away. In politics, he dominated the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) from its founding in 1879 to his death in 1920. He promoted pillarisation, the social expression of the anti-thesis in public life, whereby Protestant, Catholic and secular elements each had their own independent schools, universities and social organisations. In effect, by the doctrine of predestination and the assumed hierarchy of strands of humanity, instead of the sanctity and equal dignity of all races, the oneness of humanity was denied and God, the Calvinist version, was rendered nude. In God’s nudity, man and God were disrobed of their singular catholicity. The world proceeded on the devaluation of God disrobed of its essential catholicity to a mere partisan god to superintend an age of hatred. These steps led to confusion and ambivalence regarding the validity of universal axioms underpinning the topsy-turvy of the Human order. These confusions were expressed epistemologically and intellectually, spiritually and temporally, materially, physically and in the relativity of the now numerous and competing systemic values. The universe of humanity was driven by great cognitive dissonances and associated with it many relativities and dichotomies. The new systemic rot upended the seeming cognitive coherence of a more sane humane and godly dispensation. The Era of Great Cognitive Dissonances The era of great cognitive dissonances coincided with the age of hatred and were manifest in: conceptual and hierarchical dichotomies (black/white/yellow/brown humanities); ethical/value relativity and depreciations (no universal ethical standards); rationalism and the Enlightenment versus the superstitious and irrational; epistemological quackery (bogus science); and authentic narratives versus contrived constructions (utilitarian blasphemy to suppress the Other). Woven together these constituted the underpinnings of the exterminating externalities under which black humanity has labored until today. It gave a systemic context to what was the eventual fate of South Africa. The conspiracy that led to the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 was predicated on this broken template of a world driven by the fundamental principles of the era of great cognitive dissonances. That era milked the nude catholic God and its depraved predatory Human Order. Every voice was drowned in the imposed silences of hegemonic hatred. Only the narratives of the predator was legitimate. All else was de-validated in the depraved Human order. And their god was of evil. The gods of the subject conquered were banished into rumbling silences. There was a paradox. The subject and conquered had to give up all the essences that clothed their dignity: the narratives of their heroics, their rituals and the placations of their gods, the integrity of their communal spirits. They had to ape and obey the diktats of the new false and foreign gods of the hegemonic order. They had to self repudiate and spiritually die for their rebirth in the false image of the new master. They had to be born again in the name of a squalid, stinking and naked god. Identity Defection of Black Humanity The lamentable outcome was, has been and is the continuing mass identity defection of black humanity to all else except their black humanity. In the case of South Africa, as indeed black Africans and people of mixed race accepted their imposed inferiority and self repudiated and converted to the Dutch Reformed Church, church members debated the question of racial separation. Pressures grew for racially separate congregations, and the issue was complicated by the demands of some black church members for their own churches and congregations. Black identity defection was integral to the construction of the depraved Human order that tore the robe off the one God of and for all humanity. The extant Human order was in crisis everywhere. The situation recalled the scenario that Absalom Jones and his colleague Richard Allen had faced a century or so ago in far away United States. In 1786, the white members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia met and decided that black members of the Church should sit only in the balcony. Absalom Jones (1746-1818) and Richard Allen (1760-1831), who had led many blacks into the Church, learned of the decision only when, on the following Sunday, ushers tapped them on the shoulder during the opening prayers, and demanded that they move to the balcony without waiting for the end of the prayer. Following the white gang up, they walked out, followed by the other black members. Meanwhile, President James Monroe in the United States worked assiduously to remove black freedmen from the United States. His main concern was the potential of racial contamination of whites through miscegenation across the races. The policy led to the founding of Haiti and Liberia. The Exterminating Externalities There is a familiar history to this. The exterminating externalities that pervaded the era of the Union of South Africa beginning 1910, was, it may be argued, legally preceded by the gang up of the British and the Boers against blacks in the Peace of Vereeniging of 30 May, 1902. In order to accommodate the anti black interests of the Boer republics, the treaty terms excluded universal franchise for both Black and White. Blacks were effectively disenfranchised. The rationale being the British realization that for racial domination to be viable, an alliance with the Boers was necessary. This anti black alliance was instrumental in serving the political interests of Great Britain whose British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain intimated that Britain’s vision of a negotiated peace to foster unity among the settler populations, was to ensure that that British culture and loyalty to the crown would be the foundation of the new dispensation. South Africa became a Union with this burden on the 31 May 1910. These developments were met with undisguised hostility from blacks. This is the contrived broken universe that shaped Mazisi Kunene’s earliest engagement with his environment. They were also the preeminent drivers of the mangled zeitgeist of a thoroughly malevolent global era that baby Mazisi Kunene and his generation were consigned to. Kunene was born 12 years after World War I, or the First World War. Known also the Great War, WWI was a global war instigated by Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. The war involved more than 70 million armed men. 60 million Europeans were mobilized and many hapless Africans were co-opted to engage in Europe’s mad krieg that is recorded as the largest of human folly in history. When Mazisi Kunene was nine years old, Europe and its deranged sympathizers, including the Union of South Africa, on both sides were at each other’s throats again. South Africa was embroiled in the limitless madness as the guardian of the Cape route in the course of the war itself. It’s uncertain allegiances were conveniently tossed about by the ebb and flow of the conflict itself. The unfathomable malevolence of that era, in its horrible global manifestations and its specificity and immediacy in the Union of South Africa, Between the founding the Union and 1920, segregation became central to South African political, social, and economic life as whites addressed the “native question.” In 1911 a Mines and Works Act was promulgated. It was revised in 1926 to reserve certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers. The Natives’ Land Act followed in 1913. The Land Act demarcated less than one-tenth of South Africa as black as reserves for lands while prohibiting any purchase or lease of land by blacks outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which blacks could live on white-owned farms. These all, including the Native (Urban Areas), directed the transcendental struggle of Mazisi Kunene. It was a time of great tumult. The outcome of the Anglo-Boer war was the emergence of a consolidated South African territory through the merging of the four separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony and Orange River Colony. It included the territories formerly part of the Boer republics annexed in 1902, South African Republic and Orange Free State .the Cape Colony, Natal, Orange Free State. Yet, in the context of malevolence of that era, the peace agreement and the terms of the Union of South Africa agreed to in 1910 set the stage for the emergence of institutionalized black oppression and the stout resistance that began almost thereafter. The South Africa Act of 1909 could be considered as an empowering of the decisions reached at the National Convention of 1908 by the British Parliament. Also, on the 31 May 1910, exactly eight years after the Boers had made peace with the English through the Treaty of Vereeniging, South Africa became a Union. By ignoring the wishes of the majority of the population, the formation of the Union of South Africa created the political upheaval and turmoil that engulfed the country until the negotiated settlement that gave birth to the Republic of South Africa. Meanwhile, the Native (Urban Areas) Act segregated urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by blacks. Blacks were also effectively disenfranchised. Legislation was proposed to increase the reserve areas in order to remove black voters in the Cape from the common roll in 1926. That objective was finally realized through the Representation of Natives Act (1936). Blacks now voted on a separate roll to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly. That was the world the fathers of Kunene had dreaded and combated. For the future of the Union and its obnoxious policies, a profane religion based on a corruption of god and man founded on a simple philosophy was necessary to de-validate morality, ethics and to create a new ‘god’ immune to conventional morality. The task of the creation of this mean and immoral god fell to the Broederbond. They searched for and looked up pervert intellectuals wherever they could find such for theoretical justifications. John Mattison observes that South African segregationists found such a character in a Dutch politician, theologian, newspaper editor and academic Dr Kuyper. Matisonn illuminates that the Afrikaner nationalists who followed Kuyper called themselves Christian nationalists. They included the leaders of the Broederbond from the 1920s to the 1970s. Running against the tide of world history that sought to wrestle power from the divine rights of kings and humanize governance, the South African ethnic hegemonists believed that South Africa’s leaders were chosen by God. Christian nationalism relied on several biblical texts that Kuyper had highlighted. Accordingly, Christian nationalism provided the ideology of a simpleton racist god, the Broederbond the organizational traction, for this human horror. This backdrop of a corrupted idea of a moron god provides the challenging contours all black South Africans had to traverse. The landscape was principally noxious for their continued survival: spiritually, culturally, economically, including the challenges to the very idea of the humanity of the black race. Bullets could destroy power lines and sabotage the economy, but bullets could not pierce this malady. Words and ideas were the principal anti dote against this drunk god and his demented disciples on earth. Mazisi Kunene and the Struggle for Holistic Emancipation Against this very bleak backdrop, by 1912, almost two decades before the birth of Mazisi Kunene, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the founder of the African National Congress, had established Abantu-Batho newspaper, partly in response to the unification and the emergence of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Mazisi Kunene’ life’s struggle can be located in this larger ferment as pivotal to the struggle for holistic revalidation of the essences of a denied humanity and also a strong centrality in the unbroken continuity of an imposed struggle: physical and metaphysical and, with greater precision, spiritual and cultural, of the circuit of like comrades and kindred spirits of the intellectual wars before him. In the hallowed pantheon of these affirmative resistance in word would be found the AC Jordans, Tiyo Sogas, largely reputed as the first major modern Xhosa intellectual, HIE Dhlomos and his robust intellectual interlocutor Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, whose relationship with Mazisi Kunene cannot be glossed over in deconstructing the trajectory of Kunene’s life, SEK Mqhayi, Clement Martyn Doke, Simon Majakethetha Phamotse, Thomas Mofolo, Azariel M. Sekese, Zakea D.Mangoela, Everitt Lechesa Segoete. The canons of the struggle are codified in Shaka, Kunene’s epic. Cite page 189, line 31 in Emperor Shake the Great Our fathers sat telling tales of their past. They debated and argued over many mysteries of life The king sat with the councillors, making jokes and laughing happily From afar could be heard the boom of their laughter. Thus was peace manifest in the land of our Forefathers From many regions many people came to sit and talk at the Assembly... Detesting the ease with which others have access to their masters. Can anyone challenge these profound truisms?. In the face of all this, it is imperative to raise questions in relation to the predilections of black humanity to totally immerse itself in identities with foreign connotations and dominant belief systems and to adopt same as the motor driving its devastated societies all over the world. The levers of foreign religions have thus redefined and imposed false identities and strange conceptions of the cosmos that elevate the place of every strand of creation save for the denigration of black humanity in that cosmos. They are central to the inability of black humanity to emancipate itself from the debilitating existential conditions in which it is universally trapped. The slave let go of the heavy metal contraptions around the necks, wrists and legs of black humanity, after he had internalized toxic influences that have him bound to precepts and dehumanizing worldviews that essentially denigrate his being. Black humanity remains trapped in its old chains of servitude to others of his own volition. In many ways he helps to tighten the shackled contraptions. Kofi Awoonor enunciates this danger when he states that if you come to a people and take away their religion, which is their first line of defense and protection, you dislocate them completely. Surveying the dehumanizing mental landscape created by extraneous influences and now perpetuated by black humanity, he laments that “Africans are the only people who forget” Finally, given the existential situation of black humanity, he calls for some kind of reconstruction of the mental landscape around our objective historical reality. Transformations of the Social Identity of the Black Earthling The process of instigating identity defection is adapted as the deadly games of the aspiring dominant forces have evolved. But the end goal has not changed. Accordingly, the reflexive structure of the identity of the Black Earthling is constantly being processed and his social order is constantly fluid and unstable. These transformations of the social identity of the Black Earthling are driven by overt violence, if considered necessary to attain the goal in a cost-effective manner, or subtle engagements instituted by the external Other to change the cognitive appreciation of Self, the destruction of the entrenched social practices and habits that constitute and define behavior as well as give structure to everyday relationships. In essence, the induced genetic modification of the core values, understandings of the universe embedded in the self- appreciation of the locus of the Black Earthling in this cosmos all alter the foundation of the cognitive complexity of reality. The adulteration of this Self transforms the cognition of identity and social reality. [caption id="attachment_66172" align="alignright" width="640"] Guests at the lecture[/caption] It realigns perceptions of the global reality and the corporate structure and comprehension of this new community. The structure and comprehension of the new community are based on new parameters of identification that rest on the newly acquired value orientations that complete the defection from and alienation of the old self and identity. This defection, replacing the normative epistemological and ontological certainties of the previous Self and identity, is the essence of the born again. Religious identification offers a distinctive “sacred” worldview and ‘eternal’ group membership, unmatched by identification with other social groups. The post-transformed community that has emerged relies on unreflective acceptance of transformed common practices and norms signaled by common identity markers such as religion. . These transformations first alter the perceptions of self interests as identity can be perceived as pivotal to interest articulation. There is no persuasive explanation of why people should develop and change some habits of community as distinct from others unless self-interest is included as habit, dynamically interacting with cognitive dimension of identity. Meanwhile, as a social identity anchored in a system of guiding beliefs and symbols, religion ought to serve a uniquely powerful function in shaping psychological and social processes, unmatched by identification with other social groups. This has been the case in much of Africa, and more importantly in sub-Sahara Africa. Flowing from this was the convenient validation of the abuse of black humanity. The intensity of the expressions continues to fluctuate according to the vagaries of the evolving epochs on mainstream avenues of the trajectory of human evolution. With this comes the denigration of every phenomenon associated with this devaluated humanity. The survival of Black humanity is thus infused with conditionalities expressed in a concrete ultimatum that constitutes one polar end of the two fundamental choices before black humanity. These conditions were daily realities at all levels of the black Being: as individuals, as collectivities, communities and societies, and ultimately as a race. These preconditions have underpinned the construction of the universe of the Black Earthling and his social institutions in relation to the larger universe of the construction of the dominant external Others. This polar end terminates with the coerced and, lately, willing submission of the Black Self and of the totality of his Being through a process of self repudiation of the very essence of his humanity. This has been the precondition to survive along the margins of human existence. This choice leads to a totalistic defection from the Self. The migration is consecrated in the acceptance of the concept and terms of being born again by the defector from the Self. The alternative pole is simple: the defiance of a conscious self-validated black Being and self that stands to fight or perish standing. This is the “on reste debout” philosophy. It is a radical choice without avenues for compromise and without a continuum that is imposed on every black Being, often unconsciously. The dilemma can however be stark and defined by the compelling imperatives confronted by the individual, groups or a social institution, including the state. Often they entail conscious choices associated with dire consequences. At the tail end of the last century and more pronounced in this millennium, Black humanity has begun to face the consequences of its massive choice to self-repudiate and defect from the Self to be consigned as a willing proxy to the margins of the sphere of the dominant external Other. The massive flight has been from the Self rather than a fight for the validation of the Self. The manifestations of this self-denigrating choice are explicit and the implications continue to haunt it. The core of this toxic defection is the coming spiritual whitening of the entirety of black humanity. The political expression of this defection is a willing complicity in the execution of neo-imperialist agenda of the metropole. The massive defection of black humanity to the side of his oppressor is reminiscent of the impact of the early gin, gifts from the agents of the invisible benevolent lord, to the African chief who got all intoxicated. In this state of involuntarily induced stupor, the drunken chief sold every subject into slavery. In essence, black humanity continues to reel under the influence of the toxic in the numerous variety of intoxications from all manner of foreign brews, following the choice to defect from its authentic moorings and his dissociation and alienation from his timeless understanding of the universe. Unhinged under influence from its own self and his understandings of the cosmos and his locus in this universe, the wretchedness of the Black Earthling is hauntingly daunting. The struggle for self-validation has, therefore, been in the order of a compelling imperative for the continued existence of this and the consecration of the integrity of the inner core that remains defiant in the face of the massive assault and the visible capitulation to the external Others. Yet, viewed from a longitudinal span of history, the struggle has been a Babylonian dance: for every step forward –black humanity has taken two steps backward. From slavery to the contemporary era of a resurgent renaissance, progress has been fitful. The deck has certainly been stacked against black earthlings. Emancipation of a people entails the simple task of self-validating the integrity of its own identity against the odds. In this, African societies would seem to have failed. Karen Armstrong, a renowned authority, observes that this is what has happened in the modern world. She notes that the Axial sages have an important message for our time, but their insights will be surprising-even shocking- to many who consider themselves religious today. “It is frequently assumed, for example, that faith is a matter of believing certain creedal propositions. Indeed, it is common to call religious people ‘believers’, as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics. A person’s theological beliefs were a matter of total indifference to somebody like Buhda. Some sages steadfastly refused even to discuss theology, claiming that it was distracting and damaging. Others argued that it was immature, unrealistic, and perverse to look for the kind of absolute certainty that many people expect religion to provide.” The immediate question to ask is where this leaves the mass of black humanity that has repudiated its own understandings of the cosmos, only to find there are no certainties on that plane anywhere, including in the hegemonic faiths that have ensnarled it with the false promises of absolute certainties. In the final analysis, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. As such in succumbing to the assault of foreign powers and their faith about the superiority of their religion and accepting the denigration of African traditional forms of worship, black humanity has been duped and fallen victim to the toxic propaganda of foreign and hegemonic theologies. The central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Only black humanity has been intoxicated on this toxic foreign brew and fallen flat on its face to this propaganda common to all religions. The price of the historic capitulation of the Black Earthling to the hegemonic external Other, among others, is the pervasive proneness to instability and conflict in her communities. The levers of foreign hegemonic religions, in redefining and in the imposting of false identities and strange conceptions of the cosmos that elevated the place of every strand of creation save for the denigration of black humanity in that cosmos, have proven to be the greatest source of carnage at all levels of human interaction among black peoples. They are central to the inability of black humanity to emancipate itself from the debilitating existential conditions in which it is universally trapped. It was easy to let go of the heavy metal contraptions around the necks, wrists and legs of black humanity, after he had internalized toxic influences that have him bound to precepts and dehumanising worldviews that essentially denigrate his being. Black humanity remains trapped in its old chains of servitude to others of his own volition. In many ways he helps to tighten the shackled contraptions. Kofi Awoonor enunciates this danger when he states that if you come to a people and take away their religion, their spirituality, which is their first line of defence and protection, you dislocate them completely. Surveying the dehumanizing mental landscape created by extraneous influences and now perpetuated a lost black humanity, he laments that “Africans are the only people who forget” Finally, given the existential situation of black humanity, he calls for some kind of reconstruction of the mental landscape around our objective historical reality. The process of instigating identity defection is adapted as the deadly games of the aspiring dominant forces have evolved. But the end goal has not changed. Accordingly, the reflexive structure of the identity of the Black Earthling is constantly being processed and his social order is constantly fluid and unstable. These transformations of the social identity of the Black Earthling are driven by overt violence, if considered necessary to attain the goal in a cost-effective manner, or subtle engagements instituted by the external Other to change the cognitive appreciation of Self, the destruction of the entrenched social practices and habits that constitute and define behavior as well as give structure to everyday relationships. In essence, the induced genetic modification of the core values, understandings of the universe embedded in the self- appreciation of the locus of the Black Earthling in this cosmos all alter the foundation of the cognitive complexity of reality. The adulteration of this Self transforms the cognition of identity and social reality. It realigns perceptions of the global reality and the corporate structure and comprehension of this new community. The structure and comprehension of the new community are based on new parameters of identification that rest on the newly acquired value orientations that complete the defection from and alienation of the old self and identity. This defection, replacing the normative epistemological and ontological certainties of the previous Self and identity, is the essence of the born again. Religious identification offers a distinctive “sacred” worldview and ‘eternal’ group membership, unmatched by identification with other social groups. The post-transformed community that has emerged relies on unreflective acceptance of transformed common practices and norms signaled by common identity markers such as religion. Flowing from this was the convenient validation of the abuse of black humanity. The intensity of the expressions continues to fluctuate according to the vagaries of the evolving epochs on mainstream avenues of the trajectory of human evolution. With this comes the denigration of every phenomenon associated with this devaluated humanity. The survival of Black humanity is thus infused with conditionalities expressed in a concrete ultimatum that constitutes one polar end of the two fundamental choices before black humanity. These conditions apply at all levels of the black Being: as individuals, as collectivities, communities and societies, and ultimately as a race. These preconditions have underpinned the construction of the universe of the Black Earthling and his social institutions in relation to the larger universe of the construction of the dominant external Others. This polar end terminates with the coerced and, lately, willing submission of the Black Self and of the totality of his Being through a process of self repudiation of the very essence of his humanity. This has been the precondition to survive along the margins of human existence. This choice leads to a totalistic defection from the Self. The migration is consecrated in the acceptance of the concept and terms of being born again by the defector from the Self. The alternative pole is simple: the defiance of a conscious self-validated black Being and self that stands to fight or perish standing. This is the “on reste debout” philosophy. It is a radical choice without avenues for compromise and without a continuum that is imposed on every black Being, often unconsciously. The dilemma can however be stark and defined by the compelling imperatives confronted by the individual, groups or a social institution, including the state. Often they entail conscious choices associated with dire consequences. At the tail end of the last century and more pronounced in this millennium, Black humanity has begun to face the consequences of its massive choice to self-repudiate and defect from the Self to be consigned as a willing proxy to the margins of the sphere of the dominant external Other. The massive flight has been from the Self rather than a fight for the validation of the Self. The manifestations of this self-denigrating choice are explicit and the implications continue to haunt it. The core of this toxic defection is the coming spiritual whitening of the entirety of black humanity. The political expression of this defection is a willing complicity in the execution of neo-imperialist agenda of the metropole. The massive defection of black humanity to the side of his oppressor is reminiscent of the impact of the early gin, gifts from the agents of the invisible benevolent lord, to the African chief who got all intoxicated. In this state of involuntarily induced stupor, the drunken chief sold every subject into slavery. In essence, black humanity continues to reel under the influence of the toxic in the numerous variety of intoxications from all manner of foreign brews, following the choice to defect from its authentic moorings and his dissociation and alienation from his timeless understanding of the universe. Unhinged under influence from its own self and his understandings of the cosmos and his locus in this universe, the wretchedness of the Black Earthling is hauntingly daunting. The struggle for self-validation has, therefore, been in the order of a compelling imperative for the continued existence of this and the consecration of the integrity of the inner core that remains defiant in the face of the massive assault and the visible capitulation to the external Others. Yet, viewed from a longitudinal span of history, the struggle has been a Babylonian dance: for every step forward –black humanity has taken two steps backward. From slavery to the contemporary era of a resurgent renaissance, progress has been fitful. The deck has certainly been stacked against black earthlings. Emancipation of a people entails the simple task of self-validating the integrity of its own identity against the odds. In this, African societies would seem to have failed. Given this broken world and its implications as exterminating externalities for black humanity and in the specific location of Mazisi Kunene, implicit in his epics are counter denunciations of the fundamentals and elemental strands of the construction of the troubled systemic and predatory Human order, of which the draconian Apartheid system was an immediate local and temporal expression. Put together, Kunene’s life’s work was to advance the legitimacy of the various expressions of God’s creation, the authentic voice of the authentic narratives of this inclusive and various authentic strands of the universe. In effect, he legitimized the disparate world views of all expressions of God’s one and singular humanity, their numerous differential but valid experiential specificities and the mode of expression of the uniqueness and peculiarities of each strand. These all were legitimate and affirmative contributions that validated the totality of the collectivity of the human imprint and spirit. Mazisi Kunene’s work was thus to add significant value to the search for the resolution of the crisis of the legitimacy of a beastly inhuman Human order. Some affirm that this born again syndrome was integral to the project of the imposition and enforcement of modernity. The kindly benign mission civilatrice to a supposedly backward race with a heart of darkness. Kunene beamed the light on and illuminated the core of the beauty of this much maligned heart to the world. That era of hate and denunciation of reason that entailed also the repudiation of the essential oneness of humanity, elicited various intriguing responses. Some, conflicted and completely taken in by the denunciation of the essences of their humanity as blacks, produced negative works that rationalized their own subjugations and thus self repudiated the very essences of their belabored own Africanness. These conflicting emotions were reflected in the relationship that subsisted between major South African intellectual gladiators of the time. The evolution of the relationship between Benedict Wallet Villakazi and Mazisi Kunene exemplified this. Their early relationship was marked by some interesting ideo-philosophical frictions. But these were later resolved as Kunene built on Villakazi’s appropriation of the classicism of the great Shaka Royal poet. It would seem that the early challenge for Benedict Villakazi, as with many in contemporary times, was resolving a conflict of allegiance to his Catholicism and his sense of cultural nationalism that is founded on the continued validity and acceptance of the cosmology of his nativity that was denounced by his catholic faith. The overarching centrality of the response to the Shaka phenomenon in the confrontation with the forceful hegemonic intrusions is confirmed by the massive engagement of the Zulu Cultural Society of the 1940s. Mazisi Kunene was too young to be a member, but the Shakan preoccupation of the Cultural Society permeated the intellectual circuits of the generation after. Thus Mazisi’s struggle advanced the focus of Zulu intelligentsia dating back to early nineteenth century. That struggle could be interpreted as the great battle to preserve the sanctity and wholeness of the Zulu man. The essential Zulu is the one who has retained his appellation as a Zulu, attuned to the spirit of his Zulu ancestors, articulates his cognitive essences in Zulu, and completely at peace with the primacy of his personal references and referrals as Zulu. But his goes beyond the Zulu. It is same for the Ndebele, the Xhosa, the Mossi, Baule, Yoruba, Igbo, Itsekiri, etc. IT is so for th essential African. Kunene and the Burden of the Broken World of Black Humanity So, Kunene’s was not a peculiarly Zulu fight. It was the burden of the broken world of black humanity. The main struggles of Africa are all exemplified in the life and times of Mazisi Kunene. It is the struggle at the level of ideas and in the robust ideational jousting to validate our essences by rolling back externally imposed narratives. Chinua Achebe aptly puts it as the struggle to tell our own stories. Yet, that struggle has proven to be the weakest point of Africa. The imposed contextual deficits by their nature ineluctably delineated the epochal struggles to mend the debilitations of their time-a life commitment to the unlimited pursuit of mending the very broken world of the oppressor and against th the dilapidated word and world of the oppressed. Redeeming both the oppressor from his moronic cognitive simplicities and elevating the cognitive complexities of a self repudiating oppressed through an affirmation of his worth and sanitation of his abused universe was the objective. These challenges surfeited the era of Mazisi Kunene and its children. For Kunene, the cosmic mind (ultimate wisdom) conceptualizes the totality of life in the same way as the chameleon’s vision circles in all directions at once. In this robust mythological ambit, several truths converge to express the variation of the ultimate truth. There is no absolute truth for through the history of life, the central thematic thrust is the idea of balance. In thought and in this weltanschauen, the concept of a world divided between opposing forces has no place. Here the operative cosmic forces are projected not in conflict with one another but as moving towards the establishment of desirable balance. Conflict is therefore a temporary and insignificant phenomenon which accelerates the process of establishing a balance.1 Against this background, in the context of social action, every development constitutes a motion that expressed by often irrational an mindless responses to episodes. Yet, the forces of cosmic growth are so akin to each other that they are depicted in a state of integration. It is thus that motion is creative in the sense that it simultaneously sets up the process of destruction and birth.2 Flowing from this, the life force which directs the seed to each stage of actualization contains within it both temporal and universal attributes. Some of these are corrective , that is they restore the cosmic balance after every point of degeneration and regeneration. He identifies Gods like Mthobi, Simo and others as playing such integrative catalytic roles. In the volatile age of darkness and hatred in which Kunene does this transcendental explications, Masilela Ntongela advances that given the disruptions encrypted in the process of modernity, the real challenge before New African intellectuals of Zulu extraction in the 1940s was how to preserve and transmit the exemplariness of Shaka’s greatness in military art rendered in an intellectual genre. Ntongela asserts then that it is not surprising that Zulu intellectuals such as Mazisi Kunene, R R R Dhlomo, Jordan Magubane, H I E Dhlomo, Benedict Villakazi, John Langlibalele Dube all wrote either essays, or novellas or poems or epics in search of the historical meaning of Shaka. With due cognizance of the corpus of works that emerged from this search, Mazisi Kunene is acknowledged as having produced that exemplary historical appreciation and representation of Shaka in literary form. That’s on the literary plane. Given the rotten spiritual order that poisoned the fate of humankind in South Africa, Mazisi Kunene soars very high in validating the abused spirituality of black humanity. But the challenge of self redemption or the redemption of a disdained people clearly defined the burdens of Mazisi Kunene. He is the man I have dubbed, awed by the tenacity of his spirit, the breadth of his canvass, the depth of his intellect, the purity of his engagement, the musicality of his lyrics, the density of his passion, the stoutness of his vision, the transcendence of his mind, and the sheer intensity of his life’s works, all on behalf of Africa, an Abami Eda- Yoruba for a Spirit Being. The Abami Eda is a roving human bearing an organic arsenal encapsulating the very spirit of a people, especially in times that threaten to crush the communal being, the organic communal spirit and the communal essences as well as ultimately, the soul of the community. A spirit being is recognized in the constancy of its implacable and principled defiance to these threats. It is the last one imbued with the unquenchable pulse of the ancestor standing. To the ramparts!! To the Ramparts. Thus is it that in the beginning was the spirit world. The spirits speak in tongues and codes. And so has been the triumph of the word over tribulation. Ask Mathabo Kunene, Mazisi Kunene’s defense witness. May the Ancestors continue to embrace and nourish your mind; may Africa’s children sing the songs of our Forefathers. AMANDLA!!! N G I Y A B O N G A Ademola Araoye (Ph.D), delivered this Inaugural Mazisi Kunene Lecture at Durban International Convention Center, Durban, Province of Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa on 18 March, 2017 Ademola Araoye is a former Nigerian diplomat and a retired official of the United Nations. Currently a Visiting Professor associated with the SARCHi chair on African Diplomacy and International Relations at the University of Johannesburg, Araoye is author of critically acclaimed books including Cote d’Ivoire: The Conundrum of a Still Wretched of the Earth and Sources of Conflict in the Post-Colonial African State. He is a regular contributor to TheNEWS magazine