Biography
Nontsizi Mgqwetho was born in South Africa. Virtually nothing is known about her, but she emerged in the literary scene in the 1920s, contributing over 95 Xhosa language poems to the Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu. She was the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa. She withdrew from the poetry scene for two years and then reappeared between December 1928 and January 1929 with two final poems. She disappeared again, and nothing has been heard from her. Her poems examined male dominance, ineffective leadership, Black apathy, White malice and indifference, economic exploitation, and nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. A collection of her poems, The Nation's Bounty, was collected in the original Xhosa along with translations by Jeff Opland.
