Stranger at Home

This book is about the poetry, vision, and deeply inhospitable context of one of South Africa’s most talented praise poets, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi. The author of five volumes of Xhosa poetry and performer of inspired and elegantly crafted izibongo (praise poems), Manisi saw himself as a man of multiple places, allegiances, and identities at a time when these markers of self were rigidly policed. This book examines Manisi as an inventive negotiator of rural and urban spaces, modernity and tradition, performance and publication, the local and the foreign. It will appeal to scholars in literary studies, especially in the areas of orality and folklore. The book’s broad historical and political focus makes it useful to Africanists and cultural historians, while anthropologists and ethnographers will be interested in its concern with cultural translation and the interweaving of the urban and the rural, of tradition and modernity.