The anniversary of 92 years since his birth Mazizi Kouneneof the South African poet and activist who fought against apartheid in his country, honors with its present Doodle Google.
Kunene was born in Durban, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. From his childhood he wrote poetry and short stories in the Zulu language, and was 11 years old when his works were first published in local newspapers.
He defended the preservation of the poetic traditions of the Zulu. The dissertation entitled “A detailed overview of Zulu poetry, traditional and modern “stigmatized the alteration of traditional Zulu literature from Western literature.
Kounene opposed the policy of racial discriminationas head of the African United Front. Leaving the country in 1959, he helped spread the movement. He had close relations with the African National Congress (ANC) and in 1962 became its main representative in Europe and the USA. Ten years later he became the financial director of the ANC. In 1975 he became a professor of African Philology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and had previously lectured at several universities as a cultural adviser to UNESCO. He remained with UCLA for almost two decades, retiring in 1992.
Kunene first wrote his poetry in the Zulu language and then usually translated it into English himself. In 1966 his works were banned by the South African government.[11] In 1970, Kounene published The Poems of the Zulu, an anthology of poems that ranged from “moral thought to political commentary.”
In his main work, the epic poem “The Emperor Saka the Great”, published in English in 1979, Kunene tells the story of the Zulu prosperity and rule when they had Sakas Zulu as their king. The 438-page epic was described (by Christopher Larson) as “a monumental work and achievement by any measure.” This nationalist project maps the development of the Zulu nation under Saka, as he reshapes their army and nation and subjugates many tribes, eventually conquering more than half the area of ​​present-day South Africa.
The Hymn of the Decades: a Zulu epic, released in English in 1981, tells the Zulu legend of how death came to the human race. In 1982 Kounene published a second collection of poems, entitled The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain / poems, which contained one hundred of his poems.[8] In this collection the emphasis was on socio-political issues.
Unodumehlezi Kamenzi was published posthumously, in 2017, and is the edition of Emperor Saka the Great in the Zulu language, as the poet’s dream was to print his poem in its original form.
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