As African tradition would have it, the passing of a baobab-scaled storyteller ink still damp in the tongue of his people shakes the ancestral soil and, like a quake beneath the planet’s library, tilts every shelf from village hut to distant tower of world letters.
When Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o stepped through the final page of life on 28 May 2025, Africa’s heartbeat skipped a line, and every alphabet from the Cape to Cairo shed a vowel. Likewise, Ba Henry Makata Buiswalelo’s exit echoed the same sentence a season later (in our own right), two thunderclaps from the same talking-drum sky. Yet the second roll proved quieter the kind you feel in the marrow before it reaches the ear.
So, within three moons, we congregated again, a circle of hush beneath the same baobab of grief. The parchment of night taught us its lectionarium: that colossi are not only ladders to the far horizon, they are also lanterns hung low enough for the village path. Their stature is tallied not in miles of fame, but in the candle-length of nearness, in the warmth they leave on the faces they first called kin.
In HM, as we often referred to him, we have not just lost a conscriptoris; we have lost our Ngũgĩ, our Achebe the bright mind whose pen was audacious enough to undertake some of the most sacred tasks of all and return the word to the tongue of the cradle.
This has been the act of return, the nucleus of that quietly radical revolution. For generations, the superstructure of African literatures has been, in necessity and circumstance, constructed with the bricks and mortar of colonial languages and produced masterpieces aplenty. The work of Chinua Achebe in English or Léopold Sédar Senghor in French carved out a space for Africa in the global literary imagination. They asserted, “We are here,” and that was the important first step. But as Ngũgĩ argued so eloquently, the deeper step is to assert, “We are here, as ourselves.”
This step was embodied in the life and works of Henry Makata Buiswalelo. He vividly apprehended that writing in one’s mother tongue is not a parochial act, but a profoundly philosophical and cultural act. It is, as Ngũgĩ reminds us, “writing to the soul of your people.”
To write to the soul is not merely translating thought. It is writing from a unique cosmological space, a particular way of embodying and perceiving the world in the very syntax and rhythm of language. Ba Buiswalelo was not just choosing a linguistic tool when he decided to write in his (and our) mother tongue. He was choosing a specific vehicle for memory. His stories became the vessels in which the elders breathe again their wisdom, humour, and the unique turns of phrase. That which is often flattened in the transition to a global language was preserved in full, textured glory.
The cadences of his prose were no accident; they were “older than the drum” a pulse crawling out of the womb of time to tap the same scarred hide of memory. His writing ferried the grit of ancestral soil, the forest’s held breath, and the drum’s own ventricle, all beating inside the marrow-deep syllables of the mother tongue.
This mission placed HM within a brave new vanguard of African intellectuals who consciously centred their indigenous languages. Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, after a celebrated career writing in French, wrote Doomi Golo in Wolof (The Hidden Notebook). His reasoning was visceral: “Only when I return to Wolof does my sentence flow like blood.”
That metaphor captures the essence of HM’s work. Our mother tongue, Silozi, is not a garment to be donned for cultural display; it is the lifeblood of our thought and creativity, the flame of imagination within our world. For Buiswalelo, writing in Silozi was an act of sustenance, of keeping the world upright. A world spoken in its own language is coherent, centred, and whole. A world forced through another’s grammar is permanently tilted, mediated, and distorted.
HM’s work is a generational compass. To us, the youth of that time, he and others like him were not relics to be forgotten in our passion for a globalising present, but navigos. They revealed that our path forward is tied to the road behind.
Buiswalelo gifted us, in our youth, a profound intel: we could “hear tomorrow singing in cadences older than the drum.” He embodied a modernity that does not decay proving one can be both modern and rooted, can innovate while honouring tradition. His work answered the anxiety of identity, affirming that our languages, stories, and proverbs are not emblems of underdevelopment, but unique keys to understanding our place in the world and envisioning tomorrow.
Yet, this occasion is marred by indelible sadness. Makata’s absence has created a vacivus that cannot be plenus. We inhabit a continent where publishing in indigenous languages is still a mirage. What little exists is born of the persistence, sacrifice, and obstinacy of lone authors a light in the wind without the support of infrastructure, cultural institutions, or strong publishing houses. Every author of Buiswalelo’s ilk is a first-mover, a fragile flame in the dark. His passing was a rude awakening, a strong wind threatening to snuff out other lights clarifying the urgent need to build the ecosystem that can sustain this work: publishers, distributors, critics, and academics.
In mourning the man, we mourn the fragility of the very project to which he devoted his life.
But sorrow is not the last word. For Plato, a good man meets grief not with tremor, but with the steady hand of a scales-master, balancing his soul. So it is with us. For HM, the last word belongs to his work, to the “scroll” that contains him in every syllable retrieved from silence. The last word for a writer is that we read them, engage them, and let their ideas find new life.
Buiswalelo’s generation, who “heard on top of their mind and voice,” asserted our culture through language. He listened and responded. His duty was to ensure our response was not a lonely one. Now, we must become the readers and responders. We must claim the scroll, convoke its truths, and continue the act of reclamation.
May the twilight birds carry the sentences of Uncle Henry Makata Buiswalelo from Linyanti, light across the savannah now and forever. May they carry and embed his words into the air of classrooms, so children might hear and love the sounds of their names and stories. May they carry his books into the halls of power, to shape policies of education and culture. May they scatter his words like seeds into the hearts of new writers, who will see their work not as an end, but as a sacred beginning.
His corporeal voice is now extinguished, but within his texts the voice continues to echo inviting us back to ourselves, to our mother tongues, and to the spirit of our people.
As the Silozi saying reminds us:
“Muishuñe Mutakolobelwa, mulapo ha una yo mukuswani kapa yo mutelele, ku fita fa teni haisi kushuña, ho sa shuñi, wa kolobelwa.”
We are challenged by his absence to continue his legacy, lest, as the adage warns: “Litalo la ka ki Sikuto.”
The archive and the footprint are with us.
Hamba kahle, Uncle HM.
Dr.Mishake Mubuyaeta, (PhD) Information Science , University of South Africa (UNISA)
Write in his personal capacity from Lifasi Mamili’s Village
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