Archibald Campbell Jordan

Archibald Campbell Mzolisa Jordan (30 October 1906 - 20 October 1968) was a novelist, literary historian and intellectual pioneer of African studies in South Africa.

He was born 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, Mthatha, completed his junior certificate at Lovedale College, Alice, and then won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College. His literary and linguistic training consisted in a BA Degree (1934), followed by a Masters thesis (or "dissertation"), submitted to the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1942, entitled Some features of the phonetic and grammatical structure of Baca (that is, of Bhaca), which was an important early contribution to the study of non-standard Nguni languages, specifically, of a Tekela Nguni language. This was followed in 1957 by a doctoral degree: A Phonological and Grammatical Study of Literary Xhosa.

While teaching in Kroonstad (in the then Orange Free State Province) between 1934 and 1944 Jordan mastered Sotho, 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 Yezinyanya (1940), later translated by the author and his wife, Phyllis Ntantala-Jordan, into English as The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980). This novel, considered as one of the masterpieces 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.

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