Benedict Vilakazi: The Poet of Vilakazi Street

October 26 marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Dr Benedict Vilakazi, the Catholic groundbreaker, poet and academic after whom Soweto’s most famous street is named. Sandile Ngidi looks at the great impact of a short life. 

It’s the only street in the world to have been home to two Nobel peace laureates. When Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived with their families in Vilakazi Street, Soweto’s most famous street and today a popular tourist destination, their address paid tribute to another trailblazer.

Dr Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, a Catholic convert who died 75 years ago on October 26, was a pioneering Zulu poet and writer, South Africa’s first black lecturer at a white university, and our country’s first black African PhD holder. But at one point, the poet is said to have contemplated becoming a priest.

Vilakazi’s death in Johannesburg, after a short illness of meningitis, sent shockwaves around the country. He was buried at Mariannhill cemetery at Durban. Today his grave is largely neglected and its national significance widely forgotten outside literary circles.

Aged only 41 when he died, Vilakazi did not live to witness African independence or see Inkosi Albert Mvumbi  Luthuli become the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

Vilakazi was born on January 6, 1906. It was the year of the famous Bhambatha rebellion, a poll tax and anti-British war in colonial Natal led by Chief Bhambatha kaMancinza of the Zondi clan. It is for this reason that his parents, Mshini kaMakhwatha and Leah Hlongwane kaMnyazi, named him Bhambatha Wallet Vilakazi.

According to literary historian Bheki-zizwe Peterson, Vilakazi’s parents were kholwa (believers) and his father was a sugar farmer in Groutville, near Stanger (now KwaDukuza) in Natal. Groutville, a Protestant mission station on the banks of the Mvoti River, enabled Vilakazi to learn both the traditional and Christian ways of self-expression, culture, and spirituality.

After doing his early education in Groutville from 1912, Vilakazi went to St Francis College in Mariannhill in 1919.  Established in 1909 by Abbot Francis Pfanner, the founder of Mariannhill, St Francis has been a beacon of education in the region to this day.

Convert to Catholic faith

Although Vilakazi’s family belonged to the American Board of Missions (now the United Congregational Church), he liked Mariannhill a great deal, and converted to Catholicism. Among his mentors was Fr Bernard Huss CMM. The first principal of St Francis College, was a distinguished scholar and musician, and a social reformer. He taught subjects as varied as psychology, music, and agriculture. Fr Huss was also a great friend of Dr John Langalibalele Dube, the founding president of the African National Congress.

After his schooling, Vilakazi enrolled for a three-year teacher training course, graduating in 1923. According to Peterson, in all three years of study, Vilakazi’s marks were in the third-class category.

He first taught at a rural school in Mariannhill, and while at the Catholic seminary at Ixopo, he began to study towards his matriculation.

According to his contemporary, the poet, writer and journalist Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo (1903-56), Vilakazi “received such excellent assistance from the Catholic priests with whom he worked that he became one of the leading African scholars in Latin, and preferred to read Virgil and other Latin classics in the original, not in the English translation, which he regarded as inferior”.

While teaching at Ohlange School in Inanda, Vilakazi in 1934 earned his bachelor of arts degree, with distinction, on African studies from the University of the Witwatersrand. Thereafter, he was appointed to Wits’ Bantu Studies department, becoming the first African to lecture white students at a white university. He also taught at the Oblates’ Catholic University of Basutoland (now Lesotho), on whose senate he served.

Vilakazi went on to earn his masters, and in 1946, the year before his death, he became the first black African of this soil to earn a doctorate.

In 1935, Vilakazi published his first collection of Zulu poetry, Inkondlo kaZulu (The Zulu Song), and his debut novel, Noma Nini (No Matter When).

He also co-authored the first Zulu-English dictionary, with Professor Clement M Doke, his boss at Wits. Vilakazi didn’t live to see its publication in 1948. The pain of Vilakazi’s premature death was felt deeply when the dictionary came out. Prof Doke wrote: “This dictionary of [Vilakazi’s] mother-tongue — the language he loved — will stand as a monument to a great African.”

Dhlomo later noted: “There is no doubt that when he died [Vilakazi] was already the most outstanding figure in Bantu literature as original writer, critic and research scholar. Academically, he had outpaced many who had an advantage of many years’ start before him.”

A Natalian at heart

Vilakazi lived in the big city, but his heart never left his home region, the province we now call KwaZulu-Natal. Dhlomo, who also hailed from the region, described the milieu in which Vilakazi moved: “His reactions to city life in Johannesburg must have been those of a shocked and disillusioned man. He found a sophisticated African society little interested in academic degrees as such, but in talent and achievement in all walks of life. A talented jazz band leader or successful business man were ranked higher than an unproductive graduate, and were more popular and respected.”

Vilakazi had great ambitions in his academic life, which he hoped would culminate with doctoral studies at Oxford or Cambridge, and returned the disdain of those who looked down on academic pursuits. Vilakazi “was often haughty, aloof, cold and deliberately rude to the highly-placed Africans against whom he had a grudge, although he was warm, social and friendly to the rank and file”, Dhlomo noted.

More than a poet

By the 1930s, Vilakazi was also making his name as a poet. But he was much more than that. He was a philosopher, novelist, lexicographer, essayist, and dramatist for whom writing African languages was the hallmark of an Africanised literary practice.

Many of Vilakazi’s poems give a sense that he perhaps saw himself as someone, who, despite his talents and diligence, was destined for sadness. He had accepted his move from Natal to Johannesburg to work at Wits “with much misgiving”, according to Adrian Koopman, a Zulu literary scholar. He cites as an example the poem “Wo, Ngitshele Mntanomlungu  (“Wo, Tell me, son of the white man”). The first line asks, “Ungiletheleni lapha?” — “For what good reason have you brought me here?”

In a heated debate with HIE Dhlomo from June 1938 to July 1939 — preserved in The South African Outlook and Bantu Studies journals — Vilakazi advocated for dramatic works “written by a Bantu, for the Bantu, in a Bantu language”. He wrote that he did not regard “English or Afrikaans dramas on Bantu themes, whether or not these are written by black people, as contributions to Bantu literature”.

Despite the immense difficulties and contradictory pressures he faced as the first Zulu poet to publish a full-length Zulu poetry collection, Vilakazi’ s importance in education and African literature remains. The Vilakazi-Dhlomo debate continues to be a critical foundation stone for a historical appreciation of the politics of colonialism, language, modernity, and the impact of missionaries on various facets of African cultural and intellectual identity.

Central in Vilakazi’s vocation as a poet and public intellectual was the quest to foster the advancement of African languages as a source of pride and critical vehicles for the understanding and production of knowledge.

“I have an unshaken belief in the possibilities of Bantu languages and their literature, provided the Bantu writers themselves can learn to love their languages and use them as vehicles for thought, feeling and will,” he once wrote.

Although Dhlomo had bitterly attacked Vilakazi’s use of rhyme schemes in his Zulu poetry, the two writers respected each other.

Literary scholar Tim Cousins, who authored a book on Dhlomo, notes that in his poem “The Girl Who Killed to Save”, Dhlomo used a part of Vilakazi’s poem “Sengiyakholwake”.

An enduring legacy

There is no doubt that Vilakazi’s legacy endures, especially among young black South African scholars who value his visionary fortitude. Mazisi Kunene, democratic South Africa’s first poet laureate, found a major source of inspiration in Vilakazi. In a poetic tribute, Kunene writes: Your great songs echoed to the accompaniment of the festival horn, It was the beginning of our ancient new year, Before the foreigners came, before they planted their own emblems.

Dhlomo, whose father was a friend of Bhambatha, called Vilakazi “the cultural Bhambatha of his people” who “waged great battles for their cultural glory”. A famous poet and writer himself, he saw Vilakazi as a man ahead of his own time and underappreciated by it. Dhlomo wrote: “True genius and the highest quality only can defy time, as in the cases of names like Keats, Shelley, Schubert and others.”

In 2016, South Africa’s highest honour, the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold, was conferred posthumously on Vilakazi, for “his exceptional contribution to the field of literature in indigenous languages and the preservation of isiZulu culture”. The honour has been awarded only 17 times.

The other people of letters among awardees, all posthumously, are Bessie Herd, Alan Paton and Tiyo Soga.

Sandile Ngidi is an arts activist, and a Zulu-English literary translator.

This article was published in the October 2022 issue of The Southern Cross Magazine