Recruitment and Re-Memory: S.E.K. Mqhayi's 'Umkosi Wemidaka: The Dark-Skinned Army' (1916) and Fred Khumalo's Dancing the Death Drill (2017)

Abstract

The poem by the great isiXhosa poet and imbongi S.E.K. Mqhayi, 'Umkosi Wemidaka: The Dark-Skinned Army' (1916), inspired and encouraged Africans to volunteer for the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) in the First World War. Employing techniques of traditional poetry, Mqhayi's work marks the transition from oral to written literature. By the 1950s, various accounts from the oral tradition, including other poems and news reports by Mqhayi, gave rise to a nationalist mythology on the sinking of the SS Mendi, including an apocryphal speech of the Reverend Isaac Dyobha and a legendary 'Death Drill'. In 2017, 100 years after the sinking of the troopship SS Mendi in 1917, her political and symbolic legacy continues to inform the national narrative, given the extensive media coverage of the event in 2016/2017 and other acts of commemoration by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). Fred Khumalo's recent novel, Dancing the Death Drill (2017), fictionally re-enacts...