Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Mazisi Kunene, a South African poet laureate and anti-apartheid activist, who would have been 92 today. His work recorded the history and traditions of the Zulu people, the preservation of which he advocated passionately throughout his life.
Kunene was born on May 12, 1930, in Durban — a South African province now called KwaZulu-Natal. As a child, he loved writing short stories and poetry in Zulu. By age 11, he was publishing his writings in local newspapers and magazines. As he grew older, he became a strong supporter for the preservation of indigenous Zulu poetic traditions.
Kunene went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Natal in Zulu and History, and later a Master’s degree in Zulu Poetry. His master’s thesis, titled “An Analytical Survey of Zulu Poetry, Both Traditional and Modern,” notably critiqued how Western literary traditions were displacing Zulu literature.
At the start of apartheid in South Africa, Kunene resisted the government’s racist segregation system through his writing. However, when the South African government began to crack down on the resistance movement with increasing violence in the late 50s, Kunene was exiled (1959) and he fled to the UK where he played a pivotal role in the organisation of the anti-apartheid movement in Europe and Africa.
Despite his work was banned in South Africa during his exile, Kunene went on to publish monumental works of literature such as “Emperor Shaka the Great,” “Anthem of the Decades” and “The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain”:
- In “Emperor Shaka the Great,” (published in English in 1979), Kunene tells the story of the rise of the Zulu people under Shaka.
- “Anthem of the Decades: A Zulu Epic” (published in English in 1981) tells the Zulu legend of how death came to mankind
- “The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain: Poems” (published in England in 1982) is Kunene’s second major collection of poems, which consists of 100 poems total.
In 1975, Kunene became an African literature professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught for nearly two decades. During this time he also served as a cultural advisor to UNESCO.
Kunene returned to South Africa in 1992, where he taught at the University of Natal until his retirement. 3In 1993, Unesco honoured him as Africa’s poet laureate and later became the first poet laureate of democratic South Africa.
After a long battle with cancer, Kunene died in Durban on 11 August 2006. His legacy lives on not only in his poetry but also through the Mazisi Kunene Foundation Trust, which is dedicated to nurturing Africa’s next generation of literary talent.
Happy birthday, Masizi Kunene!
