Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali ngu nyana ka Ayola no Unam (born 17 January 1940) is a South African poet.
[1] He worked as a messenger in Soweto before becoming a poet, and his first book, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1975), explores both the banality and extremity of apartheid through the eyes of working men of South Africa, even while it recalls the energy of those Mtshali frequently calls simply "ancestors".
Published with a preface by Nadine Gordimer, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum was one of the first books of poems by a black South African poet to be widely distributed.
It provoked considerable debate among the white South African population, but was extremely successful, winning the Olive Schreiner Prize[1] for 1974 and making a considerable profit for its white publisher, Lionel Abrahams.
In a 1978 interview, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile compares Mtshali's case to the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, a period when the importance of white patronage for black work made the emerging black literature more politically complex.