Poetry
Sounds of a Cowhide Drum
Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali · 1971
Synopsis
Poems of life in the townships and the city, Johannesburg and Soweto, and of the rural past. In “The Master of the House”, a Black man who has come to see his wife in the servants' quarters speaks with a reassuring politeness in which irony shows through; “Boy on a Swing” gives a child naive, insistent questions about his family and about what he is; “A Roadgang's Cry” lets us hear the mocking song of a road gang under the eye of a white foreman. Bread and hunger recur as images of survival, in a free verse that passes from one voice to another.
Context
The collection appeared in Johannesburg in 1971 from Renoster Books, under the direction of Lionel Abrahams and with a preface by Nadine Gordimer, then in 1972 in London from Oxford University Press, and in New York from Third Press. It was one of the first books of poetry by a Black author from the country to be widely distributed, and it provoked a debate among white South Africans, many of whom felt addressed for the first time by a Black writer. A bilingual edition, with his translations into Zulu, appeared from Jacana in 2012.
Who it is for
Poems in English, in free verse, in a familiar and ironic tone, accessible without preparation; not translated into French.
Prizes and reception
More than ten thousand copies sold in the first year, a record for a poetry collection in the country; Olive Schreiner Prize 1974.
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