ABSTRACT
lt was the Zulu poet B.W. Vilakazi who used the term ‘forgotten men’ when referring to the izimbongi, or bards, of the Zulu kings Shaka, Dingane, Mpande and Cetshwayo. But are they forgotten? Or do they merely sleep in the minds of many Zulu, powerful unseen influences that shape their use of language and guide the flow of their creative imagination? The importance of izibongo, or the praise-poetry of the Zulu kings, chiefs and eminent men, in the Zulu cultural traditions was clearly recognised by James Stuart when he compiled his set of Zulu readers for schools, in the 1920s. These readers, referred to below, abound in texts of izibongo, accounts of Zulu history and details of the lives of leading figures of the Zulu nation including their most famous imbongi, or bard, Magolwana. Stuart, showing a foresight still uncommon among today’s educationists, realised that contact with Western culture and Western education should by no means presuppose a total jettisoning of one’s own literary and cultural heritage. A later collection of izibongo, C.L.S. Nyembezi’s Izibongo Zamakhosi (1958) which is based partly on Stuart’s work and partly on independent sources, bears witness to the same fact. Nyembezi’s book is still, almost twenty years after its initial publication, widely used in schools, colleges and in university courses and is in fact a sine qua non for any adequate Zulu course. This old, developed and time-honoured art form has also exerted its influence on the young written literary tradition. Vilakazi himself, although initially under the sway of the English Romantic poets, in some of his later poetry shows a return to the style of izibongo. Other younger poets such as J.C. Dlamini have followed Vilakazi’s lead in attempting to harness the rhetorical power and stylistic devices of the traditional praise-poem in written composition. Thus in formal western education and in the written literary tradition the influence of izibongo is real and living. Behind the izibongo stand the shadowy figures of 72the bards, Vilakazi’s ‘forgotten men’. It is to them that we now turn.
