A vital novel for today - and the past

22 July 2022

Mphuthumi Ntabeni's novel, The Broken River Tent, published in 2018 by Blackbird Books in Johannesburg and in a new impression this year by Rising Action Publishing in Canada, is probably the most powerful, engaging, most deeply researched and philosophically grounded novel by any South African novelist so far. No other novel I know of reaches so profoundly into the past two centuries of South Afica's historical experience, with its rich grasp of both Xhosa and European cultures, in conflict and together, set both historically and as recently as 2017. In no other novel I've read does traditional African clan society in its dying throes as an independent culture in southern Africa become more contemporary.

The novel won the University of Johannesburg's Debut Prize for South African writing in English in 2019. 

Mphuthumi Ntabeni's following novel, The Wanderers, the second in a trilogy he is continuing from his home in Cape Town, still awaits me. Published last year by Kwela Books, it is set in the exile experience of black South Africans during the apartheid era.

With no extensive references to the apartheid era or the struggle against apartheid, the major setting of The Broken River Tent is in the final battles between the amaXhosa and the British colonial government in the Cape Colony, in which the tragic history of town after town in the Eastern Cape appears as if it were yesterday. In its final pages, Robben Island - the prison of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe - appears in its far older service for the British government as the place of death in 1873 of its antagonist, Maqoma, son of Ngqika, prince of the amaRharhabe, under sentence of twenty years hard labour. 

Maqoma is the living presence of the novel, entering into spiritual discussion between 2007 and 2017 with Phila, a Xhosa architect and intellectual who was educated in Germany (as was Ntabeni). Beginning when Phila is on a coach journey from Port Elizabeth to Queenstown for his father's funeral, their ongoing conversation merges the metaphysical with the brute realities of war and South Africa's present-day structural decay.  Phila is tutored by Maqoma in the way Dante in the Divine Comedy is guided through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise by the Roman poet Virgil, to which Ntabeni makes reference.

Grounded in extensive research, very fine writing and an exceptionally rich reading in Western culture, Ntabeni places traditional African society in South Africa in a global setting that is at once historical  and contemporary. To get an insight into the author's cultural background, I suggest readers look at his article, "What must Cope do?" (Politicsweb, 22 September 2009), posted when he was head of research in the Western Cape legislature for the ANC's breakaway political rival, Congress of the People. Ntabeni's intellectual and philosophical heritage, which was out of reach for most South African intellectuals and politicos of my generation, is present in the article.

In the same way, the Acknowledgements at the back of his book give a glimpse into some of the major historcal sources on which his research is based. He writes also how "numerous journals of missionaries and soldiers of the time greatly assisted me, especially with nuances of the era.  S.E.K. Mqhayi [1875-1945], both his literary and journalistic writings, was a companion who helped me with the tone of Xhosa oral history and storytelling. He is my companion still."

A student of architecture as a young man like Phila, a former practising architect and an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church, Ntabeni is exceptional as a novelist in how he conveys the spiritual understanding of pre-conquest Xhosa people within the context of European global literature and philosophy, while acutely alert to the language and perceptions of middle class South Africans today. In the same way, the heritage of Ntsikana - the first convert to Christainity in tribal society in southern Africa, and its teacher - together with that of the Netherlands-born missionary Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp (uNyengane among the amaXhosa) is a continuous, complex and contested theme.

In a valuable interview last year with Jeanne-Marie Jackson, associate professor of English at John Hopkins Univeristy at Baltimore, Maryland, in the US, headed "The Xhosa literary revival", Ntabeni notes how Maqoma "comes back as an ancestor to help Phila in this life".

"The idea of ancestors as guides for the living is prominent in Xhosa spirituality.  ...

"In fact, as a staunch humanist, I strongly believe that global thought, Goethe’s world literature if you like, awaits African thought traditions to be properly assimilated to it. ... The human condition is my preoccupation"

Referring to Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard and St Augustine as if in a single breath, he says how such writers infuse "philosophical and psychological substance in their writing that gives its literature more gravitas, rather than merely writing about big social issues without treating them with the deeper thinking they deserve."

It is no accident that while the "River People" is how Xhosa people spoke of themselves, the title of Ntabeni's novel, The Broken River Tent, comes from a poem, The Fire Sermon, by TS Eliot, which Phila recalls in the graveyard of  his father in his (and Ntabeni's) hometown, Queenstown:

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the bank.

This is not a book to miss. Its existence gives hope for the future.