Buthelezi graduates with doctorate exploring post-apartheid meanings of oral literature

Mbongiseni Buthelezi at the Convocation of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University in New York

In May this year, APC Associate Research Fellow and Fulbright scholar Mbongiseni Buthelezi graduated from Columbia University in New York with a PhD in Literature exploring the contemporary uses of oral artistic forms to recall the past.

He attended two Commencement Week ceremonies in New York. Columbia University Commencement is a centuries-old tradition in which the President of the University grants degrees en masse to graduating students from 18 schools, colleges and affiliated institutions. With over 11 000 degree candidates and 20 000 participants and guests in attendance, the ceremony is an unforgettable, grand-scale celebration that appropriately marks the academic achievements of the university.

Buthelezi's thesis, 'Sifuna umlando wethu' (We are Looking for our History): Oral Literature and the Meanings of the Past in Post-Apartheid South Africa, examines 'the attempt of people who trace their history to the Ndwandwe kingdom that was destroyed by Shaka's Zulu forces in the 1820s and who have organised themselves into an association named the uBumbano lwamaZwide (Unity Association of the Zwides) to engage with questions of identity and the meanings of the past.'

'I analyse the use of the idiom of heritage as well as a traditional idiom of kinship that has come to be handed down as a Zulu language for mediating social relations by the uBumbano in ways that challenge the centrality given to Shaka in narrations of the past,' says Buthelezi, who was born inUlundi in the then homeland of KwaZulu.

'I began making good on my desire to answer questions about Zuluness and its makings by studying oral poetry in my Master's thesis, which I wrote while holding my first lecturing position in the English Department at [what was then] the University of Natal... Literature offered the most useful way to hold together my interests in theatre and history, and my love for words, and I have stuck with it ever since.

'I went to Columbia to read African diaspora literature after reading Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River,' says Buthelezi. 'While there, I learnt about comparative literature and got seduced by the discipline of Anthropology. The former led to a very productive working relationship with David Damrosch. With him and Natalie Melas I co-edited the Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (2009).'

Since 2010, he has been a lecturer in African and African diaspora literature at the University of Cape Town. 'I combine my interest in literature with co-ordinating the Archival Platform's Ancestral Stories initiative, which aims to foster discussion on family histories in South Africa,' he says.