Archibald Campbell Jordan
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Archibald Campbell Mzolisa Jordan, (30 October 1906 - 1968) novelist, literary historian and intellectual pioneer of African studies in South Africa, was born on 30 October 1906 at the Mbokothwane Mission in the Tsolo district, Pondoland (later Transkei), as son of an Anglican Church minister. He trained as teacher at St John's College in Umtata, completed his junior certificate at Lovedale College, Alice, and then won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College. He completed his literary training with a BA degree (1934), an MA on the Nguni and Sotho groups (1942), and his doctoral degree on A Phonological and Grammatical Study of Literary Xhosa in 1957.
While teaching in Kroonstad (then in the Orange Free State) between 1934 and 1944 Jordan mastered Sesotho, became president of the African Teachers’ Association, and started his writing career with the publication of poetry in the newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu. He also started work on his classic Xhosa novel, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (1940), later translated by the author and his wife, Phyllis Ntantala, into English as The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980). This novel, considered as one of the master pieces of Xhosa writing and South African literature, was translated into Afrikaans as Die toorn van die voorvaders, published in 1990, and a Dutch translation, De wraak van het voorgeslacht, appearing in the classic African writers series in the Netherlands in 1999. The novel tells a gripping epic-tragic tale of the conflicting forces of Western education and Xhosa traditional beliefs amongst the “School people” and the “Ochre people” of the Mpondomise people.
Between 1945 and 1956 Jordan taught in the Department of African Languages at the University of Fort Hare. In 1957 he was appointed as lecturer in African languages at the University of Cape Town. While at UCT he began a new method of teaching Xhosa to non-mother tongue speakers, which he published as A Practical Course In Xhosa (1966). One of the eminent South African scholars, who studied Xhosa under Jordan’s guidance, was the writer and academic, prof Vernon February. Decades later he still testified to the enormous influence Jordan had on those students, and the inspiring and vital knowledge he imparted about Xhosa culture and language.
In 1961 professor Jordan was offered a Carnegie bursary to do research in the United States of America, but was refused a passport by the South African government. As a result of political pressure, Jordan was forced to leave South Africa on an exit permit. He settled in America where he was appointed professor in African Languages and Literature at the University of California (Los Angeles) and later moved, in similar capacity, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1968, Jordan died in Madison, after a long illness.
Professors Jordan's other important publications include a book on short stories entitled Kwezo Mpindo zeTsitsa, published in 1973 as Tales from Southern Africa, and an important pioneering critical study, entitled Towards An African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa (1972).
For his creative works, his pioneering research and his sustained efforts at preserving and recording in his writing the culture and history of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape, the Univ of Port Elizabeth will bestow the degree Doctor Litterarum, honoris causa, posthumously on Archibald Campbell Mzolisa Jordan on 24 April 2004.