Exploring identity: Sihle Ntuli's poetry navigates themes of belonging and home

Daily Maverick

27-06-2025

In Owele, poet Sihle Ntuli embarks on a deeply personal return, not to a single place, but to a confluence of memory, language, and landscape. As rivers flow through the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, Ntuli follows their paths to the origins of his family and clan.
Ntuli moves seamlessly between English and isiZulu, creating a collection that feels deeply personal. Paired with Samora Chapman's photography, Owele is more than just a book of poems — it's a visual and spiritual journey, searching for meaning beneath the surface of time, place, and identity. Read an excerpt below.
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Baw Baw (One for the Black Sheep)
black sheep so willing
to shear your own dark wool
to convince the eyes gazing upon you
that you too are worthy of love
behold a thread unravelling
a glass ceiling untouched
hands burrowing beneath
a heavy burden of proof
all you have ever known
was a golden child
whose body blocked your sun,
your thick black wool
eclipsed at every turn
black sheep for so long
you've lived under the sun
to the point that you've made peace
with embodying a shadow
if young lambs lose their way
only the tender bleating of the ewe
will lead them home
a voice resonates with the ram in agony
so fluent in the language of pain
how different it all could have been
if only for the nurturing
Symposia at Bernard's Quartyard
brother, if only you knew how this house came to be
& don't you ask me how I define home – at least not for now,
because your question is capable of moving me to tears.
& as we sit here on these empty Black Label crates,
consider how some have found home in cold barley,
coating throats in white foam, pacified pariahs of struggle
imagine if their Anglo-Saxon names were also forced upon us
just so others could feel at home – like umkhulu, denied
his birth name Shongani, becoming Bernard to the ones
who so forcefully removed him. brother, what I mean to say
is that KwaMashu was never our home, it was merely a place,
where his body landed after being thrown
his throne only claimed in the ceremony of his ancestral planting,
deep into the soil while his spirit was being returned home,
leaving the women of the house with the burden.
ugogo and her daughters worked hard to turn this house into a home,
this very house we've inherited – left to us after all but one died –
in their memory, may we ensure its integrity is preserved.
consider this house as compensation for the home
umkhulu lost – his clenching mind unable to let go before his soul did
with the kind of hurt that returns as soon as it is remembered.
what is home if our neighbours only speak to me in English,
oblivious to what the language has done?
& so your question about home is one that is hard to answer,
because when the pain comes, I always have to convince myself
that I am a man who cannot feel a thing – who will not feel
a thing – until suddenly I am overcome by the urge to disappear. DM