Dantessa (Dante Society in South Africa): Reading Dante in the ubuntu spirit

For our first "field note," we are delighted to have a contribution from Anita Virga and Sonia Fanucchi, directors of the Dante Society of South Africa (Dantessa). Virga and Fanucchi, along with the students who make up Dantessa, exemplify the kind of impassioned response to Dante that emerges out of a direct, sustained, and unmediated encounter with Dante's poem in a collaborative environment. The innovative work of their students and their thought leaders is a model for 21st-century spiritual, political, and civic engagements with the poem that such communal reading can bring about.

For further reading, see their collection A South African Convivio with Dante (Firenze University Press, 2021) and Fanucchi's essay "Trasumanar" in Bibliotheca Dantesca 6.

Anita Virga (Associate Professor in Italian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand)
Sonia Fanucchi (Lecturer in English Studies, University of the Witwatersrand)

Field Notes / November 10, 2024

We are both scholars at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the founders of the South African Dante Society, Dantessa. The purpose of this essay is to describe the origins of the society and the untraditional approach to Dante that we developed. The idea for Dantessa was first conceived in 2018 when we met over a coffee at the Origins Centre Museum. We were drawn to each other by our common Italian origins and the fact that we teach the Italian medieval poet, Dante Alighieri, in our respective courses – Sonia in translation in the English Department and Anita in the original version in the Italian Department. It was in this meeting that we discovered that in both of our courses, our students invariably showed a great interest in Dante, irrespective of their race, religion, home languages, and chosen majors. The striking element was that the Commedia affected South African students in a very personal and meaningful way and that these students responded to it passionately. They tended to see themselves reflected in Dante’s epic journey through the after-world, and found themselves grappling with the challenges that the text poses to their political and ethical beliefs. One of our students, for example, identified passionately with the pilgrim’s crisis, projecting herself into his narrative: “As Virgil had resurrected those years past / Dante had come back to the infernal wood / And I was standing there / In the aporia of insight and confusion / For I had been through insanity / And I was still insane" [1]. Another of our students read Dante’s text from a perspective at once political and personal, seeing in Beatrice a parallel with black women: “She [Beatrice] gives women, black women in particular, the space to be more than strong or vulnerable, one, both, or neither” [2]. It became very clear that Dante struck a note among these students, despite the Commedia’s cultural, temporal and linguistic distance from them. Many of them found themselves conversing with the text in the sense that they transposed its language and imagery into the realm of their own experiences, a process that involved both resisting and accepting Dante’s vision. This, in turn, compelled them to return repeatedly to the difficult questions that the text raises.

We felt inspired to act on our realisation that Dante has such a powerful effect on our students and decided to start a reading group on Dante, which we called Dantessa (Dante Society in South Africa) – an acronym that playfully hints at a feminization of Dante’s name [3]. Dantessa started as an informal group made up of students from our two Dante courses, who we had approached and asked to join us in reading and commenting on Dante’s Commedia. However, Dantessa soon developed beyond this, defining its purpose of creating a South African narrative around Dante: rather than considering his presence in Western academic and popular traditions, we place Dante and his work in conversation with the personal and social context of our country. Our intention is therefore to amplify the voice of the Global South in which Dante can become a meaningful presence, entirely apart from the existing tradition of his significance in the Global North. The goal of the society is to determine how and why Dante ‘speaks’ to us as South African readers and to build a community of scholars, students and writers with a shared vision.

In the early stages of Dantessa’s existence, students were encouraged to write their personal reactions to Dante and the Commedia. This was an exercise for its own sake, until we realised that in those works there was something of great value, which spoke to us as individuals even before it spoke to us as scholars. At that point, it became evident to us that our personal stories also affected the way in which we read the texts of our students and, through them, Dante. For example, the conflict between the desire to belong and the feeling of exile—the Dantesque theme that so affected our students—was not only theirs, but also ours.

We collected some of our students’ written responses to the Commedia in a book entitled A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia, published by the Florence University Press in 2021. The collection includes writings of all genres and subjects: prose, poetry, personal reflection, dialogue, non-fiction. Some are more autobiographical, and others are fictional stories, but they all have in common a very personal (and South African) approach to Dante’s text. After collecting the contributions from our students that are included in this volume, we were inspired to develop the conversation that had begun orally in our Dantessa group by analysing and drawing out the implications of the written compositions, from a scholarly perspective. Our focus was the image of South Africa that emerges from these pieces and the different ways in which Dante has contributed to this. The scholarly conversation was deepened when we broadened it to include other colleagues, external to our group. We purposely chose a wide variety of colleagues, some from South Africa, some not currently in South Africa but with a strong connection to it, some with a distant connection, and some with no connection at all. We invited them to comment on our students’ pieces, and published their essays in the second part of the volume.

Through the experience of the book, Dante became a “friend” for our young South African readers, and for us as well. We realised that Dante’s worth did not depend on his prominence in Western scholarship, but on the fact that the text was able to appeal directly and personally to our students’ own particular contexts. That was the sense of the “convivio” which appears in the title: a coming together as peers around the same table and conversing across time and space. We felt that Dante joined us at the table, not as someone who had already written what he had to say, but as someone who was still talking and making meaning with us.

The spirit of sitting around the same table and creating meaning together, reflected and drew on the concept of Ubuntu, which is so entrenched in the South Africa black culture [4]. The Ubuntu philosophy can be described as an African humanitarism, which is summarized in the isiZulu sentence ubuntu ngumuntu ngabantu - I am because of who we all are [5]. It is the recognition of the same humanity in all of us, despite time and / or space; but also that our individual humanity can exist only in relation to and because of the existence of other human beings: I am because of you. In Dantessa we are because of Dante, but also Dante is because of us. In a space where Western boundaries are broken, the living and the dead come together as peers [6], and their individuality is affirmed precisely because they are part of a group. In this context Dante is not a dead poet, but a living one, who is still speaking to us as South Africans, as a group and as unique individuals from diverse contexts. The Commedia is no longer a written text, fixed on the paper forever (scripta manent…), but a living one, which constantly changes as we change.

The notion of Dante’s text as dynamic and interactive, inspired Dantessa’s second event, a one-day festival based on the performativity of the Commedia, and the ways in which it could be dramatically embodied in various South African responses. On the 28th of March 2024, members of Dantessa, colleagues from the University of the Witwatersrand and South African artists, took to the stage and performed different interpretations of the Commedia: translations, music, original plays, performed poems, visual arts and conversations. For the first time, the first Canto of Inferno was translated and performed in isiZulu and South African Sign Language, showing the incredible creative and intellectual potential of an interdisciplinary and transcultural approach to the text. During the festival, linguistic translations went hand in hand with cultural and media translations, in a process that reimagined the Commedia, not as an impassive text, but as a dynamic, evolving language that subsumes our voices and can be spoken in a variety of ways.

Anita Virga and Sonia Fanucchi, Johannesburg, South Africa

[1] Fanucchi Sonia and Anita Virga. A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia. Florence: Florence University Press, 2021, 37.
[2] Fanucchi Sonia and Anita Virga. A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia. Florence: Florence University Press, 2021, 77-78.
[3] “a name that also suggests the feminine quality of our community which, like Dante’s “donne che avete intelleto d’amore” (VN 19), stood outside of traditional critical structures and yet was empowered precisely by this status as outsiders to expand and remake the text as part of our diverse communities.” (Sonia Fanucchi, “«Trasumanar»: Rewriting Francesca and communal approaches to reading in the South African Dante society”, Bibliotheca Dantesca 6 (2023), 176).
[4] See Munyaradzi Felix Murove, “Ubuntu”, Diogenes Africana Philosophy 59. 3–4 (November 2012).
[5] Elza Venter, “The Notion of Ubuntu and Communalism in African Educational Discourse”, Studies in Philosophy and Education 23 (2004), 152. Venter, 151, also makes the point that, “The individual is born out of and into the African community and will always be part of the community”.
[6] Mogobe B. Ramose, African Philosophy through Ubuntu (1999, 2002; rpt. Harare: Mond Books, 2005), 45.