Carrying the Cross: Isaac William(s) Wauchope's Ingcamango Ebunzimeni

Abstract

Abstract This study was conceived and developed with the intention of initiating a discussion around the prison poems of Isaac William(s) Wauchope, Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. That an African minister had published poems that were initially composed in prison seemed to suggest to me that a complex matrix of events might have informed the writing of Ingcamango Ebunzimeni. Thus this study has sought to read the poems closely against the historical context that spawned them into being. The imprisonment of an African minister for fraud seemed to present, on its own, a curious development which needed to be pursued for Ingcamango Ebunzimeni to be read closely. My concern with Ingcamango Ebunzimeni is buttressed by another purpose. As a writer, Wauchope has received attention for largely one poem that he wrote. It therefore seemed germane to bring to the fore for further analysis a wider range of his writings in order to understand the uses which writing, as a social and political practice was put under by Wauchope. The colonial setting under which Wauchope lived out his life informed these writings and Ingcamango Ebunzimeni in profound ways. At the heart of this study and the subject that it explores there is, then, a certain kind of awareness of the contradictory nature of colonial modernity and how, in turn, this forced Christian Africans such as Wauchope to adopt stances that questioned the benevolence of such a social formation to Africans even where he and his contemporaries represented an emergent class of Africans that had assimilated into a largely westernised way of life.