|
AN act of vandalism at Braamfontein Cemetery helped locate the missing
grave of Enoch Sontonga, the man who wrote South Africa's national
anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
(God bless Africa). The discovery of the grave, now a national
monument, ended months of patient and ingenious detective work by city
officials, archeologists and historians.
A confident young Enoch Sontonga, dressed in his Sunday best, in this photograph from the archives of the Amathole Museum, King William's Town
Please note that this photo cannot be copied or used without the permission of the Amathole Museum, King William's Town
Sontonga, a teacher and lay preacher, wrote the first verse and
chorus of the anthem as a hymn for his school choir. He died in
obscurity in 1905, aged just 33, seven years before the African
National Congress launched his hymn into prominence as an anthem of
black struggle against oppression.
The search for Sontonga's grave started by chance at a dinner
by the National Monuments Council in honour of then-President Nelson
Mandela, in Cape Town in late 1995. A relative of Sontonga's who was
present told Mandela that Sontonga was believed to be buried somewhere
at the Braamfontein Cemetery in Johannesburg. Mandela called for a
memorial to Sontonga in the cemetery, to be erected in time for the
first post-apartheid Heritage Day.
The National Monuments Council instructed the Johannesburg
Parks and Technical Services Department to investigate, with the
project headed by Alan Buff, presently senior manager of Technical
Support & Training.
But finding the grave proved far from simple. It took Buff
almost nine months of intensive research - a lot of it in his own time
- to locate the exact spot. One problem was that in the early
seventies, the city council covered much of the long-disused cemetery
with a metre of soil, and grassed it over, hiding all traces of the
graves. Another problem was that although records of several graves
under the name of Sontonga could be found, no grave could be found
under "Enoch Sontonga".
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika,
suggested looking under "Enoch". This tip proved correct: a grave
number was discovered: grave number 4885, buried in the Christian
Native section on 19 April 1905. Sontonga had died unexpectedly the day
before, on 18 April 1905. Buff checked his death certificate - he died
of gastro-enteritis and a perforated appendix. "It was a common cause
of death at the time - the water was not very safe."
| Biography of an anthem
Sontonga, a Xhosa, he was born in Uitenhage in the eastern Cape in
1873. He trained as a teacher at the Lovedale Institution and was sent
to the Methodist Mission School in Nancefield south-west of
Johannesburg. He married Diana Mgqibisa and had a son.
A choirmaster and photographer, Sontonga wrote the first verse and chorus of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
when he was 24, one of many songs he wrote for his pupils. Later the
same year, he composed the music. The song is a prayer for God's
blessing on the land and all its people. A well-known Xhosa poet,
Samuel Mqhayi, wrote seven additional stanzas for the song.
Sontonga's choir sang the song around Johannesburg and
KwaZulu-Natal, and other choirs followed them. The song was published
in a local newspaper in 1927, and was included in the Presbyterian
Xhosa hymn book as well as a Xhosa poetry book for schools.
Sontonga wrote his songs down in an exercise book, which was
lent out to other choirmasters and eventually became the property of a
family member, Boxing Granny. She never missed a boxing match in
Soweto, hence the nickname. She died at about the time Sontonga's grave
was declared a heritage site in 1996, but the book was never found.
On 8 January 1912, at the first meeting of the South African Native
National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National
Congress (ANC), seven years after Sontonga's death in 1905, it was sung
after the closing prayer. Solomon Plaatje, a founding member of the
ANC, and a writer, had the song recorded in London in 1923. In 1925 the
ANC adopted the song as the closing anthem for their meetings.
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika is the national anthem of Tanzania and Zambia and is also sung in Zimbabwe and Namibia.
South Africa's anthem today is an amalgam of two anthems - Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
and the Afrikaans anthem, Die Stem van Suid Afrika (The call of South Africa), written by Afrikaans poet CJ Langenhoven in 1918.
According to Buff, Sontonga's wife, Diana, sold the rights to the song for a sixpence. She died in 1929.
|
Hal Shaper, author and musician, who at the time was researching the history of
The Christian Native area consisted of three sections covering
10 acres, with 600 graves - but the plan for that section of the
cemetery was missing. This called for sharp detective work.
Says Buff: "I took all the registers, marked off sections one
by one and came up with an L-shape plan within which Sontonga was
likely to be buried. But the problem was trying to establish the width
of the pathways between graves and in what direction the graves were
filled."
Infra-red photographs taken in 1979, which reveal ground disturbances
by measuring variations in ground temperatures, helped solve some of
these problems: they indicated grave shapes and pathways.
The Department of Archaeology at Wits University was called in
to do a shallow excavation to help establish the precise burial
spacing.
This helped bring the search down to a triangle of graves of 40 square
metres, containing 33 graves. I bought a bottle of whiskey in
anticipation of the find," says Buff. But this still didn't answer the
question: where was grave 4885?
"At the end of February, in the middle of my investigations,
vandals removed tablets from the cremation wall," says Buff. The
vandalism prompted Buff to take a look at documents from the cremation
section of the cemetery - which he had not considered before - and
there he discovered a plan of the cemetery.
"It was the original cemetery plan and showed the starting
point of the section where Sontonga was buried. I could now count the
graves and establish his grave - the 112th grave in the second
portion."
The dig uncovered a grave number plate with 17 inscribed as the
last two digits, with a faint 4 preceding the 17. "A check of the
register showed that a number ending in 417 was situated four graves
away in the same row as 4885." Was it time to open the bottle of
whiskey?
Further checks of the registers and plans revealed
discrepancies and inaccuracies in the original plans. But the final
clue was that the family had registered for private rites, which gave
them the right to erect a headstone at the grave.
The Wits archeologists were called back to excavate further, and
although no headstone was found, the mark of a headstone was visible.
"No other graves in the vicinity had private rites, so this had to be
his grave site," exclaims Buff.
Grave 4885 had been located. It was time to open the bottle of whiskey.
By this stage the National Monuments Council had formed the
Enoch Sontonga Committee. On Heritage Day, 24 September 1996, a large,
striking black granite cube was unveiled on Sontonga's grave, and the
site was declared a national monument.
At the ceremony, the Order of Meritorious Service was bestowed
on Sontonga posthumously, accepted by his granddaughter, Ida Rabotape.
The granite cube placed on his grave was designed by William
Martinson, and is meant to signify reflections, especially as one moves
closer to the monument and one's image becomes visible.
Nelson Mandela unveiled the monument, and said: "By the pride
with which we bellowed your melody and its lyrics - in good times and
bad - we were saying to you, Enoch Mankayi Sontonga, that with your
inspiration, we could move mountains ...
"In paying this tribute to Enoch Mankayi Sontonga, we are recovering a
part of the history of our nation and our continent . . . Our humble
actions today form part of the re-awakening of the South African
nation; the acknowledgement of its varied achievements."
Sontaga's original obituary
Enoch Sontonga's
original death notice in the Xhosa newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu, read:
"Sontonga, E. Johannesburg. On 18 April 1905 Enoch M Sontonga
passed away. He was not sick this time. He, however, suffered at times
from stomach ache to the extent that he would predict that these were
his last days on this earth.
The black granite memorial to Sontonga, designed
One Sunday he requested to take a photograph of his wife. The wife
refused because she was suffering a toothache that particular day. This
young man was a composer for the Church of Reverend PJ Mzimba at one
location in Johannesburg. He was also a photographer and a lay
preacher. He is survived by his wife and one child. He was born in
Uitenhage and was 33 years old."
|
