Author and academic Ignatius Mabasa has spoken about the struggles he had to overcome for him to be allowed to write his PHD thesis at a South African university in Shona.
Mabasa (IG), who graduated from Rhodes University in 2021 after producing the institution’s first ever thesis written in Shona, spoke about his achievement on the platform In Conversation with Trevor hosted by Alpha Media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube (TN)
Below are excerpts from the interview.
TN: Welcome to In Conversation with Trevor, brought to you by Heart and Soul Broadcasting Services.
Today I’m in conversation with Dr. Ignatius Mabasa, a storyteller, a writer, and an academic. We need to revisit, restore, and re-story our stories.
IM: Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m so, so honoured and happy to be here.
TN: I mean, I will get to talking about the wonderful things that you’ve done, including being the first person in Zimbabwe to write a PhD thesis in Shona. I mean, who does that?
That’s amazing stuff. And I thought also today, with our good friend and colleague, Blessed Mhlanga, still in police detention, that we ought to honour him.
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We are proud of Blessed Mhlanga and the work that he’s done. We absolutely believe that he has not done anything wrong.
He was arrested for doing his work, which is constitutionally protected.
Blessed, unfortunately, joins a number of people who have been incarcerated for totally unfounded reasons and allegations Hopewell Chin'ono, Job Sikhala and Jacob Ngarivhume.
May we pray to God that he comes out and is proven to be innocent. So, yeah, he’s in our mind. We cannot forget him at all.
So, Dr, you were the first person at the time when you did this to write a PhD thesis in Shona at Rhodes University.
Talk to me about the decision to say I’m going to write my thesis in Shona and how you went about doing that.
IM: That’s very interesting. Initially, I had set out to write a creative writing thesis. I wasn’t looking at doing a PhD in Shona. I submitted my proposal to one of the universities. I wish I could name them.
TN: Name them, please.
IM: I gave my proposal to Wits University because I wanted to do a PhD in creative writing because I’m a storyteller.
I’m a writer. So, they looked at my portfolio and they said, oh, we are so sorry. You know, your works are in Shona and we have no way of verifying that you match and meet the standards that we require. Wow.
I said, look, my first novel received the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association Award, was nominated as one of Zimbabwe’s 75 best books of the century.
And then the other ones won Nama awards.
So I’m saying, look, maybe you could use that, you know, to say, okay, this is justification to say this work or this proposal and this individual can actually do their PhD in creative writing with us. And besides, I have written short stories that have been published by Irene Staunton, Jane Morris.
So, I have proven myself. But then they said, no, I was hurt.
I have written in my mother language and I want to write new work in English.
But now I am being told your works in Shona are not something that we can verify and accept that they meet our standards.
So, I started to see a replay of some form of apartheid, if I may put it that way.
TN: What year was this?
IM: That was just, you know, a few years just before Covid.
So I then, you know, talked to a friend, Flora Vettwild, she’s a professor of literature and she’s done a lot of research, you know, Zimbabwean literature.
So, I said, look, Flora, I am in trouble. I really wanted to write, you know, a thesis based on storytelling, the stories that I grew up listening to.
I want to do something unique, something creative, because anyway, novel writing is about offering something new.
So, this is what has happened. And she says, oh, I’m so sorry Ignatius.
Why don’t you try to do auto ethnography? And I can link you up with a professor who is so big into this.
And also, perhaps he may also give you an opportunity to write this in your language, because...
TN: And auto ethnography, what is that?
IM: It is when an individual is writing and studying about his or her own culture, not as an outsider now.
It’s now different from ethnography, where you had foreigners coming, describing you, talking about you, talking about your culture.
But you are now writing as somebody who is living and experiencing that culture.
So, she was saying, you have so much to tell, you know, from the time you started storytelling to how you transitioned to become a writer. You have so much.
So, that’s when, you know, I was referred to Professor Russell Cashula at Rhodes University. I gave him my proposal. He looked at it. He was wowed.
And he said, look, I have never received such a well-written proposal in years. Start writing. Start doing your research.
TN: So, this is now research on what you are writing, what are you researching?
IM: I’m researching storytelling, the history of storytelling in Zimbabwe from the time when we were colonised and how our stories changed from being oral to how they were put in books by the missionaries and to how slowly the culture of storytelling began to sort of die.
Because much later, you get to see that, you know, other forms of communication were now being prioritised. But also because of, you know, people moving, urbanisation.
TN: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you do your thesis.
How long does it take to finish your thesis?
IM: It was three years. I had the advantage of, you know, the shutdown during Covid. It just gave me, you know, so much time.
TN: What is your thesis called?
IM: I am looking at the very first Shona song. It is a song that was sung by our people when they saw the pioneer column wagons rolling into the country.
And they had no words for these objects that, you know, had wheels. And this is where you see the power of indigenous knowledge. There was analysis. They could critique.
They could make sense of what was happening. This thing is here to harvest indigenous people.
And so, I’m looking at that too, you know, so I even came up with a theory in terms of how Chemutengure uproots, removes, processes, and dumps people in completely new environments where they struggle to survive.
So, I do that through the history of the Shona folktale and the changes that have happened to it up to the point where I’m now doing ngano folktales on X.
TN: And what’s the biggest thesis that you posit in this, in your PhD thesis?
IM: The biggest thesis is we need to be careful not to be victims of historical and cultural disinheritance. We need to revisit, restore, and re-story our stories.
TN: What did you learn as you were writing this about yourself and the subject matter that you are writing on and writing about? What did you learn about yourself?
IM: I feel almost like, you know, crying. We, well, myself, but also because I’m largely using the knowledge of our people. Folktales don’t belong to, you know, an individual.
I was amazed by the power of storytelling to correct and help us make sense of a lot of problems.
And if we were to go back to our stories, to our indigenous knowledge, you will be surprised how much we would be able to solve a lot of problems that we are facing today.
Such as climate change, for example.
