The Flaming Terrapin and Valley of a Thousand Hills: Campbell, Dhlomo and the ‘Brief Epic’

Abstract

‘Epic’ is a controversial category in the study of both oral record and performance and literature in South Africa, although the form has achieved a variety of manifestations. This article examines two early twentieth-century South African poems, Roy Campbell's The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and Herbert Dhlomo's Valley of a Thousand Hills: A Poem (1942), arguing that both can be identified as ‘brief epic’, a form crucial to modernism. While both are post-Romantic, the two poets engage with the form in different ways: Dhlomo's is Wordsworthian, while Campbell's tends to the neo-Miltonic and is part of early modernism's re-discovery of myth. As regards the communal energy of epic, Dhlomo's poem is national in its implications, while Campbell's is mundane and individualistic. Yet the co-incidence of form and mode, as well as the poets’ historical contiguity, suggest that both may be read as contributing to South African literature as a coherent order.

Notes

^* Thanks to the librarians at the Bodleian and Johannesburg Public Library as well as the Campbell Collections of the University of Natal for their help. I am also grateful to two anonymous JSAS readers and Deborah Gaitskell for their feedback. An earlier version of this article appears on Campbell in Context (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004), a CD edited by J-P. Wade and J. Coullie.

 1 J. Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1983), pp. 145, 212. See also I. Hofmeyr, We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (London, James Currie, 1991); I. Okpewho, The Epic in Africa (New York, Columbia University Press, 1979) and Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (London, Cambridge University Press, 1983).

 2 Stow's two epics are: ‘The Settlers’, a long poem in manuscript in the National Library in Cape Town, and The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and the Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country, G.M. Theal (ed.) (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1905), the hero of which is the Bushman; see my ‘The Hero of The Native Races: the Making of a Myth’, in M. van Wyk Smith and D. Maclennan (eds), Olive Schreiner and After: Essays in Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler (Cape Town, David Philip, 1983). F. Brett Young's They Seek a Country (London, Heinemann, 1937) is of a kind that descends to Wilbur Smith. A. Delius, The Last Division (Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1959) is a smart and rare instance of mock epic.

 3 M. Nathan, South African Literature: A General Survey (Cape Town/Johannesburg, Juta, 1925), p. 194.

 4 See T. Voss, ‘Roy Campbell's “The Zulu Girl”: Context and Tradition of a South African Poem’, English in Africa, 15, 2 (October 1988), pp. 1–11, where I argue that Campbell probably knew and used Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa (1916).

 5 A sympathetic identification with the Zulu – also present, together with settler apprehension, in ‘The Zulu Girl’ – is suggested by ‘Si Kulu Lez'Isiswe’ [Great Must be this People], under which title Campbell translated some lines ‘from the Zulu War-Song during the 1906 Rebellion’. See MS in Killie Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal, KCM 25943, File No. RCB 13. Campbell probably made his translation from the Zulu text transcribed by James Stuart in A History of the Zulu Rebellion of 1906 and of Dinuzulu's Arrest, Trial and Expatriation (London, Macmillan, 1913), p. 117. (Thanks to Jeff Guy for this reference.)

 6 See Johannesburg Public Library, Strange Collection, 5 Pam 572(653) Cam (1926), for notes Campbell prepared on the Zulu for Anna von Schubert, where he writes of their triumphant sense of humour and their art of conversation, ‘always indulged in as a rite or ceremony … I have heard conversations among young Zulus which were comparable in delicacy to some of the Idylls of Theocritus’. He also quotes some superstitions, legends and jokes. See also R. Campbell, Collected Works, P. Alexander, M. Chapman and M. Levenson (eds), 4 vols (Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, I and II, 1985; III and IV, 1988), III, p. 98.

 7 In 1926 in a letter from Natal to his friend and patron C.J. Sibbett in Cape Town (National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, MSB I (1–112), Box No. 1, Correspondence: Letter no. 28:1), Campbell writes of ‘my book on the native mind’ as if such a volume is soon to appear. (Plaatje uses the phrase ‘the back of the native mind’ in the preface to Mhudi of 1930 [Johannesburg, Quagga, 1975, p. i] but the phrase seems to have been common in South African debate during the 1920s and 1930s.) Campbell describes his book, which he has sent to Sir James Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl, as a scientific treatise, concerned only with psychology. He is critical of British colonisation, as opposed to Roman, and of white South African attitudes and policies: the complacent assumption that whites hold all the economic and political initiative, the artificial restriction and retardation of blacks, and the fact that so few whites ‘can speak a single native language … The obvious thing is to reform native education’. Despite all this, Campbell still uses the term ‘nigger’ and refers to Britain as ‘home’. Another letter to Sibbett, also of 1926, suggests that ‘The Pitso’ (Sotho for ‘a traditional gathering or conference’: Dictionary of South African English, [Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1998] may have been an early version of, or name for, The Wayzgoose.

 8 But published in London by C.A. Roy for Collins.

 9 Quoted in T. Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1985), p. 217.

 10 M. Chapman, Southern African Literatures (Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1996) and The New Century of South African Poetry (Johannesburg and Cape Town, Ad. Donker, 2002).

 11 Yet Valley of a Thousand Hills is amongst Dhlomo's earliest published poems: H.I.E. Dhlomo, Collected Works, ed. N.W. Visser and T. Couzens (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1985), p. 290.

 12 My theoretical framework relies heavily on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism [1957] (New York, Atheneum, 1968) and Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake [1957] (Boston, Beacon, 1967). I quote The Flaming Terrapin from Volume I of Campbell's Collected Works, and Valley of a Thousand Hills from the first edition (Durban, Knox, 1942), with some reference to the Collected Works.

 13 Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005).

 14 Attwell, Rewriting, p. 144, quoting Frye, Anatomy, p. 249. Frye's definition of the poetry of personal utterance itself derives from J.S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (1859) (London, Routledge; New York, Dutton, 1905), p. 101. Mill devised it not to distinguish between one kind of poetry and another, but between poetry and eloquence: ‘Poetry and eloquence are both alike expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard’. Mill's is a post-Romantic dichotomy. Attwell, Rewriting, p. 145, argues further that ‘The lyric poem has as its origin in early modernity the sonnet, which is quintessentially the performance of the individualist, the exhibitionist, the courtier, the lover’. But the Renaissance sonnet is an eminently ‘eloquent’ (rhetorical) form and mode, not completely distinguished in Mill's aphorism.

 15 Attwell, Rewriting, pp. 159, 167.

 17 D.J. Opperman, ‘Roy Campbell en die Suid-Afrikaanse Poësie’, Standpunte, 8, 3 (March, 1954), pp. 4–15; pp. 9, 10.

 16 A. Pajalich, ‘The Influence of Vorticism on Roy Campbell's The Flaming Terrapin’, English in Africa, 15, 2 (October, 1988), pp. 13–23; quoting pp. 19, 23.

 18 D. Wright, Roy Campbell (Writers and their Work), (London, Longman Green for the British Council and the National Book League, 1961), p. 11.

 19 Quoted in Ad. Donker, Roy Campbell: Collected Works (publisher's promotional brochure, Johannesburg, n.d.), p. 9.

 20 Wright, Roy Campbell, p. 11.

 21 Pajalich, ‘The Influence of Vorticism’, p. 18.

 22 Campbell, Collected Works, III, p. 98.

 23 Frye, Anatomy, p. 323.

 24 Les Génies de la Mer: Masterpieces of French Naval Sculpture (Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, April 2005); Exhibition note: the Iroquois myth was collected by Father Joseph Lafitau in 1724.

 25 D. Lemming and J. Page, The Mythology of Native America (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 108, 77.

 26 Quoted in J. Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (London, Harper Collins, 2001), p. 51.

 27 C. Mutwa, Writings of a Zulu Witch-Doctor (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), pp. 25–6.

 29 R. Smith, Lyric and Polemic: The Literary Personality of Roy Campbell (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972), pp. 18, 21, and quoted pp. 21, 23.

 28 Pajalich, ‘The Influence of Vorticism’, pp. 22–3.

 30 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 110, 340.

 31 Frye, Anatomy, p. 97.

 32 Frye, Anatomy, p. 96.

 33 D.S.J. Parsons, ‘Roy Campbell, John Davidson, and The Flaming Terrapin’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 24, 3 (July 1993), pp. 75–93.

 34 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 316.

 35 Campbell, Collected Works, III, p. 287.

 36 V. Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 (1933), (New York, Penguin, 1994), pp. 470–3.

 38 M. Kunene, Anthem of the Decades (London, Heinemann, 1979), p. xix.

 37 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 359.

 39 Frye, Anatomy, p. 61.

 40 Frye, Anatomy, p. 61

 41 A. Rimbaud, Oeuvres, S. Bernard (ed.) (Paris, Garnier, 1960).

 42 Campbell, Collected Works, III, pp. 287, 286.

 43 The Donne, Bridges and Harte poems are all in J. Purves, The South African Book of English Verse (London, Longman, 1915), pp. 292, 190, 243.

 44 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 265.

 45 Couzens, The New African, pp. 220, 222.

 46 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 365, 367.

 47 Couzens, The New African, p. 42, notes that Dhlomo ‘wrote that his father “came from” Mahlabathini’. (I thank Adrian Koopman for generous help with Zulu names, beliefs and customs.)

 48 Kunene, Anthem, p. xxvi.

 49 ‘Imilozi’ refers to the whistling sounds made by the ‘abalozi’, the whistling spirits who hover in the thatch of the huts of certain diviners. (Adrian Koopman, personal correspondence.)

 50 A.Z. Zungu, Usukabekhuluma and the Bhambatha Rebellion, tr. Dr A.C.T. Mayekiso (South African Literature Translation Series), (Durban, CSALL, 1997), p. 1. Dhlomo's father Ezra ‘used to herd cattle with Bambatha, and said that he and Bambatha were “just like twins”' (Couzens, The New African, p. 42). Chakijana's ‘name is a diminutive of the Zulu word for mongoose – uchakide … is one of Zulu folklore's quintessential trickster characters. To some people uHlakanyana is a separate … character … to others … the same character under another name’ (Adrian Koopman, personal correspondence).

 51 ‘…the lantana plant, which has bright berries … said to cause drowsiness and forgetfulness. Famously, these berries were eaten by the chameleon when on his way to pass on God's message of immortality to human kind, causing him to delay for several days, only to be overtaken by the lizard, bringing news of God's change of mind, i.e. that mankind would be mortal’ (Adrian Koopman, personal correspondence).

 52 Couzens, The New African, p. 222. Here again there may be a parallel with Campbell, who wrote to his Presbyterian parents: ‘The whole moral of the poem is contained in Christ's words’ and quoted Matthew 3:10 and 5:13. (See Pearce, Bloomsbury, p. 50.) Campbell is attempting to reconcile Social Darwinist implications with the Christianity of his youth (and middle age).

 53 Couzens, The New African, p. 221

 54 Couzens, The New African, pp. 197–216

 55 Dhlomo closely fits Frye's bill for the ‘Romantic poet’. See Frye, Anatomy, pp. 61–2.

 56 From the 1985 Collected Works version of Dhlomo's poem, p. 318.

 57 Campbell, Collected Works, III, p. 82.

 58 Visser and Couzens (eds), Dhlomo, Collected Works, p. xi.

 59 Dhlomo, Collected Works, pp. xi, xii; but see T. Voss, ‘Ambiguity: The Example of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 12 (1999–2000), pp. 8–23.

 60 Dhlomo, Collected Works, pp. 297–8. ‘Mlingi’ may be a personification rather than a specific person: from the verb ‘ukulinga: to perform magic, to do tricks’, hence ‘magician, conjuror … certainly someone who can make strange things happen’ (Adrian Koopman, personal correspondence). The epilogue's prayer for re-creation avoids uMlingi's blasphemous challenge.

 61 S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 2 volumes (London, John Murray, 1835), II, p. 264.

 62 See Frye, Fearful Symmetry, pp. 319–21.

 63 See his KwaDedangendlale, in Amal'eZulu (1946) (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1980).

 64 M. Chapman, South African English Poetry: A Modern Perspective (Johannesburg, Ad. Donker, 1984), pp. 38, 210, 232.

 65 Dhlomo, Collected Works, p. xiii.

 66 Dhlomo, Collected Works, p. xiv.

 67 Purves, The South African Book, p. 76.

 68 C. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, A. Adam (ed.) (Paris, Garnier, 1961).

 69 From ‘Musa’ in Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (London, Ward Lock, 1910), p. 265.

 70 ‘Literary Theory and Criticism of H.I.E. Dhlomo’, N. Visser and T. Couzens (eds), Special Issue of English in Africa, 4, 2 (September 1977), p. 58.

 71 ‘Literary Theory and Criticism of H.I.E. Dhlomo’, N. Visser and T. Couzens (eds), Special Issue of English in Africa, 4, 2 (September 1977), p. 61. ‘Malleated’ was misprinted in the original (Ilanga Lase Natal, 10 April 1943) as ‘malleanated’. To malleate is to hammer or beat thin, so as to re-shape: an apt metaphor for the revolutionary change of an economy based on gold.

 72 ‘Literary Theory and Criticism of H.I.E. Dhlomo’, pp. 59, 62. As in Valley of a Thousand Hills, Dhlomo identifies his people with the Trojans and against the dominant, perhaps imperial, power of ancient Europe.

 73 ‘Literary Theory and Criticism of H.I.E. Dhlomo’, pp. 71, 72.

 74 D. Taylor, ‘Unbroken Record: A Study of Roy Campbell’, Trek, II, 13 (10 and 24 October 1941; 7 November 1941). I thank Corinne Sandwith for sending me copies of these essays.

 75 D. Taylor, ‘Selected Criticism’, edited and introduced, with bibliography, by C. Sandwith, English in Africa, 29, 2 (October 2002), pp. 5–85; pp. 68–9.