PenAfrican: Gompo Book and Cultural Festival 2025

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  • PenAfrican is Mphuthumi Ntabeni's regular column for LitNet.

Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi and I, as writers who hail from the Eastern Cape, have had the dream of reckoning with the literary history of the Eastern Cape for as long as we have known each other. When, last year, there were celebrations of 200 years of Xhosa in the written word, we thought it an opportune moment to put the idea into action. The Gompo Book and Cultural Festival to be held in East London on 21 to 23 March 2025 is the tentative first step towards accomplishing this goal.

Although the Europeans, in recorded history, first encountered the tip of Africa at the Cape of Storms (Arabs and Chinese came before), the Eastern Cape is where the process of Western colonisation and native land dispossession gained notoriety and the official sanction of laws and structure. Once the Europeans had dealt with the Khoekhoe people through genocide, the next group of people they needed to subjugate and decimate were the Xhosa in the eastern parts of the Cape Colony. The prior presence of Arabs, Chinese and Portuguese is not extensively dealt with in the Anglo-Dutch bias of our written history. Although the Scottish-born historian GM Theal, often regarded as the father of South African history, delves into Arab and Portuguese history in southern Africa, the influence of JH Soga’s oral history on Theal (they were contemporaries who maintained mutual correspondence) was ignored by our academic historians until the writings of Jeff Peires. Peires is undoubtedly the pathfinder of Xhosa written history. Though becoming a little outdated, his books, published in the seventies and eighties, are very important – but in need of updates to keep up with recent scholarship. He has recently admitted as much in a rather exaggerated manner, by calling what he wrote before useless. At least, according to media reports, he says he is busy updating his work based on recent scholarship. We look forward to hearing him with other contending views on the panels of the Gompo Book Festival.

The festival will operate under the intellectual tutelage of SEK Mqhayi, the most influential black writer, historian and newspaper editor of the 20th century in the Eastern Cape. The popular Opland series, based mostly on the Lovedale Archive, began with Mqhayi’s book Abantu besizwe: Historical and biographical writings, 1902-1944. Recently, he published Mqhayi: Iziganeko Zesizwe: Occasional poems (1900-1943). Another of Mqhayi’s books is to be soon published as part of the Opland series. It is therefore no small feat for us to call our festival Gompo, because Mqhayi often signed himself as Imbongo Yase Gompo (the Poet of Gompo), because he spent his last years in Ntab’ozuku (Berlin), which is situated between East London and Qonce (King William’s Town). Those who honour Mqhayi fittingly refer to him as Imbongi yeSizwe, the first national poet laureate. Even the first published Xhosa novella, though now lost, uSamson (1907), was by Mqhayi.

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We often talk about and lament the fact that not so long ago, growing up in the Eastern Cape, almost all the households had small domestic libraries.
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The first and anchor panel of our festival will be a short lecture on the literary life of Mqhayi by Jeff Opland, and a soft book launch of the next Mqhayi book. The Opland series, now made up of about ten volumes, has done a lot to reintroduce us to the early black writings of the Eastern Cape. Western literature and religion on the southern tip of Africa encountered amaXhosa as the first group of independent nations in the Eastern Cape. The process of converting them began with JT van der Kemp, who landed in Rharhabe land in 1799. Van der Kemp was the first known person to codify the Xhosa language as a written language. We can credit him as the founder of the Xhosa dictionary also, a task that was driven into partial completion by the likes of TZ Soga and white missionaries in the eastern part of the Cape Colony.

Gompo is the native name of the East London area, and is named after the 14-metre-high sandstone rocks that rise from, and is separated by the sea waters, known today as Cove Rock, just outside East London. It is, in fact, where the Xhosa warrior prophet, Nxele, aka Makhanda, said the Xhosa ancestors will rise to bring wealth and chase the troublesome white settlers back to the sea. Thirty years after his death, his teachings culminated in the tragedy of the Great Cattle Killings of 1856-7. This is a very controversial and sensitive subject in Xhosa history and needs to be discussed not only by academics, but by traditional leaders and shamans of our era. It is already proving very popular in anticipation of the Gompo Book Festival. Many have delved into its underlying causes of the Great Cattle Killing, also known as the Nongqawuse incidentBut none of the given reasons has been very convincing to everyone everywhere. It would be interesting to listen to a myriad people from different backgrounds debate it.

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We wish to make Gompo Festival a platform for discussion for writers, historians, traditional leaders, church leaders and other leaders in our communities.
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We often talk about and lament the fact that not so long ago, growing up in the Eastern Cape, almost all the households had small domestic libraries. We would pick books, especially Xhosa books by the likes of AC Jordaan, PT Mtuze, etc, from home libraries, and read while looking after sheep or cattle in the fields. Now, you no longer see that kind of thing. This forms our reasoning for partnering with some schools in the informal area of Masiphumelele in East London to stock their community and primary school libraries. We welcome books or any other form of assistance towards this effort, like Dash Books has already given with book donations. The newspaper reading culture was once also a very important part of our Xhosa society in the late 19th century, replacing among the educated class the practice of village indabas, where matters of community development and history were discussed. Now, the newspaper reading culture has taken a dive, even if in the Eastern Cape there’re still remnants of it. The Daily Dispatch has been receptive enough to offer us support towards the objectives of the Gompo Festival to promote and re-establish the culture of reading for pleasure in our communities. We look forward to positive responses from radio stations like Umhlobo Wenene, SAFM, etc, which we’ve approached. We wish to make Gompo Festival a platform for discussion for writers, historians, traditional leaders, church leaders and other leaders in our communities.

The impact of Christian missionaries is another point of contention in the Eastern Cape. Having scholars and novelists who have written about the first missionaries is another great opportunity to set the record straight. Missionary studies (missiology) is one of the fastest-growing fields of academic study, because it incorporates source material history. The Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Dutch Reformed and Roman Catholic Churches have significant history in the Eastern Cape. The Germans, through the Moravian missionaries, are a neglected study in our Anglo-Dutch-biased historical studies. And the black churches in the Eastern Cape, which split from these forms, also have a long history that sometimes culminated in tragic consequences. The Mgijima’s God and Saints of Christ is just one and resulted in the Bulhoek Massacre. Many of these will form part of our panels to debate with other institutions and to form part of the oral and written debate of these issues.

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The idea is to do some soul-searching while celebrating the literary history of the Eastern Cape. One of our sessions will be on feminism, looking at the impact of Western ideology on the Xhosa “patriarchal” culture.
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The idea is to do some soul-searching while celebrating the literary history of the Eastern Cape. One of our sessions will be on feminism, looking at the impact of Western ideology on the Xhosa “patriarchal” culture. According to Soga specialists, the letter that NoSuthu (Soga’s mother) wrote in 1873 to the Glasgow Missionary Society thanking them for the role they played in the education of her son is the first known written document by a Xhosa woman. It would be marvellous to have modern feminist scholars thrash out these matters: did the missionaries really play a role in freeing Xhosa women from patriarchy, and if so, what other burdens or gains did they bring upon them? We can look at the works of the Sogas, to Noni Jabavu, and through to literary contributions of the likes of Nontsizi Mgqwetho also.

Another panel I suspect will be popular is the one titled “Towards the people-centred economy”, which aims at interrogating the persistent issues that cause underdevelopment in the Eastern Cape, like brain drain, government corruption, etc. Its partner panel is “Land dispossession, slavery and unpaid labour in the Eastern Cape”. Having writers, economists, government members and private institutions who have done ground research in these matters is imperative for us. Our aim is also to promote all Eastern Cape spoken tongues: Xhosa, Afrikaans, English and Khoe-Sān languages. One of my favourite panels is “We lingo no more: Whose language is it anyway”, which looks at the role, effect and status quo of the Afrikaans language in particular on black people of the province. It merges into “Scripting and filming the Eastern Cape”, which looks at the depiction of the province through movies. We’ve planned many more panels. The organisation Nal’ibali will help us with the children’s literary corner. We would like more schools, especially around East London, like Selbourne College, Masiphumelele and Merryfield, to partner with us how the much-neglected genre in most book festivals, that of young adult literature.

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The Eastern Cape is fast becoming notorious for all the wrong reasons, like crime, corruption, illiteracy, hunger, economic crisis, etc. The Gompo Festival will act as a stepping stone for gathering under one roof to thrash out where the real problems lie, in order to find out apho kufele khona ithole (the spot where the calf died – meaning the source of the problem).
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The Eastern Cape is fast becoming notorious for all the wrong reasons, like crime, corruption, illiteracy, hunger, economic crisis, etc. The Gompo Festival will act as a stepping stone for gathering under one roof to thrash out where the real problems lie, in order to find out apho kufele khona ithole (the spot where the calf died – meaning the source of the problem). We would also like to tap into the archival and oral memory of what really makes the province tick. We have many unresolved issues, both historical and contemporary. It is therefore a dream come true for the Gompo Festival to provide us with this opportunity of putting scholars, writers and oral historians under one roof to thrash out these issues.

Though I mention advocate Ngcukaitobi and myself as dreamers and founders of the Gompo Book Festival, many people have been working quietly behind the scenes to make it a reality. This is a collective and crowdfunded initiative that has no major sponsor. Our appeal is more to people who, like us, regard this as overdue for the Eastern Cape: Amabongo neCubeko yePhondo. We don’t always have to be looking to the government for such initiatives. As private citizens, we are also capable, especially when we come together.

We look forward to your support and seeing the kwibuya Mbo (Back to the Roots) campaign at the Gompo Book and Cultural Festival during 21 to 23 March 2025. It will be the best way to be introduced to and explore the rich history of the area along the banks of the Nxarhuni.

Also read:

In conversation with Eloghosa Osunde about Vagabonds!

PenAfrican: Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde: a book review

PenAfrican: Call and response by Gothataone Moeng – a book review

BELAB and mother tongue education: an interview with Mphuthumi Ntabeni

Initiation practices and other undesirable things

The lost diaries of Tiyo Soga

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