Like an elegant cat, the significance of this book lies curled in its title: The Nation's Bounty. “Bounty” is a word with different meanings: goodness, worth, virtue, kindness, excellence, an act of generosity, a gift, a reward. This remarkable collection of translated poems partakes of all these meanings.

The nearly one hundred poems collected here come from the hand of a Xhosa-speaking woman, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, who wrote them in the 1920s in Johannesburg for the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu. Now crumbling and yellowing, this newspaper survives in a few South African libraries. Jeff Opland, a leading scholar of Xhosa literature, has painstakingly located and collected these poems and then carefully and lovingly translated them with assistance from Phyllis Ntantala and Abner Nyamende. As Opland indicates in his introduction, Mgqwetho is “the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa.”

The resulting translation is a national cultural treasure, for the first time available to a larger readership within South Africa and beyond. The volume is indeed a bounty, full of goodness, literary worth and excellence. As an act of poetic creation and then of translation, the collection is an act of generosity, a gift to the nation and a wonderful reward for the reader.

As cultural and literary documents, the poems resonate with both historical and contemporary significance. One idea that now enjoys wide currency in South Africa is that of the “African Renaissance,” a term introduced by Thabo Mbeki in 1996 when he was still vice-president and then developed as the theme of Mbeki's presidency and his pan-African presence through the African Union. The term is now routinely invoked in much public discourse in South Africa.

The term itself has a long history that goes back to Africa's nineteenth-century intellectuals and their diasporic colleagues who grappled with the question of Africa's place in the world and how it could reassert itself or “come back” after centuries of slavery, colonialism, racism and calumny. Thinkers like the Ghanaian/Sierra Leonean writer J.E. Casely-Hayford (1866-1930), the Liberian diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), the Yoruba theologian and historian Samuel Johnson (1846-1901), and the African American philosopher W.E.B. du Bois (1868-1963) formulated ideas of African unity and pan-African solidarity as a method of political renaissance.