Marguerite Poland

Marguerite Poland is a South African novelist, historian, anthropologist and writer for children whose work is deeply rooted in the languages, oral traditions and social history of South Africa, particularly the Eastern Cape and the Zulu-speaking world.

She was born in Johannesburg but moved with her family to the Eastern Cape at the age of two, and it was there that she spent most of her formative years. She studied Social Anthropology and Xhosa at Rhodes University, followed by African languages at Stellenbosch. She subsequently took a master’s degree in Zulu literature, specialising in Zulu folktales, and completed a doctorate on ‘The cattle of the Zulu people’.

Her academic background is a vital ingredient in her fiction. Poland is not simply a novelist who happens to write about South Africa: African languages, oral tradition, cattle culture, Christianity, indigenous belief and the history of the Eastern Cape are integral to her imaginative world. She is fluent in both Xhosa and isiZulu, and her writing frequently draws upon African oral traditions.

She has had a substantial career in both children’s and adult literature. The Man/s and the Moon was important in establishing a market for children’s books in English drawing on indigenous South African traditions. Her adult fiction frequently concerns the historical encounter between European Christianity and African culture.

Shades helped to established Poland as an important South African novelist. Set in an isolated Eastern Cape mission, it examines a family and community caught between Christianity and traditional amaXhosa beliefs. The novel is concerned with the gradual erosion of a community’s traditions and with the impossibility of reconciling the two systems of belief. It was shortlisted for the M-Net Award and became a matricula:on set text in South Africa for more than a decade.

Iron Love looks back to an earlier period, drawing on the lives of a group of boys in the years immediately before the First World War. It is partly a coming-of-age novel and partly an explora:on of the social world of the Eastern Cape at the end of the colonial era. The novel was published in 2000 and has subsequently been reissued.

Recessional for Grace,s another historically grounded novel, concerns memory, loss, faith and the complicated inheritance of colonial South Africa. It was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2005.

The Keeper (2014) is set around a lighthouse keeper, Hannes Harker, whose posting to a remote island leads to the discovery of a disturbing secret.

Poland’s non-fiction emerges directly from her academic expertise. The Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Nguni CaCle of the Zulu People, written with the anthropologist David Hammond-Tooke and illustrated by Leigh Voigt, developed from her doctoral research. It combines scholarship, cultural history and a deep appreciation of the symbolic and practical importance of cattle in Zulu society.

She has also written Taken Captive by Birds, a memoir in which birds become a thread connecting childhood, landscape, memory and place.

Her standing

Poland has received considerable recognition in South Africa. She has received two Life:me Achievement Awards for English Literature, the Ingwazi Award for her contribution to the cultural history of KwaZulu-Natal and, in 2016, the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) by the South African government for her contribution to indigenous languages, literature and anthropology. If she remains rela:vely unknown in the wider world, this would seem to reflect on the insularity of anglophone readers.