Author's Preface
(revised, 2003)
This study contains my view of the several
distinct but interrelated literatures of southern Africa. Selections range from the expression of the
stone-age Bushmen (San) to that of modern voices in the independent
states. While respecting traditions,
cultures, and forms of literary response to be specific to immediate contexts I
suggest, tentatively, points of common reference in countries that, for better
or worse, have entangled histories. The
countries of the region are: South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia. (See the map of the region on p.xxiv.)
Published initially in
1996 the study is republished here with modification only to the opening
section of this Preface. The reasons for
not updating the book are twofold:
practical and intellectual. The
consideration of cost cannot be ignored.
Apart from the Preface, the current edition is a camera-copy of the 1996
text. While I would have liked to
revisit one or two judgments, this has not been possible. To have returned to the electronic files to
effect editorial or other changes would have rendered as prohibitive the cost
of republication. Southern African
Literatures is a large book.
In addition, there is the danger in any update of
introducing inconsistencies to the overall argument. The study is neither a dictionary nor a
compilation of discrete analyses of texts.
A comprehensive picture, I trust, emerges; numerous individual works are subjected to
critical review. The purpose is to ask,
however, what might constitute a literary culture in a challenging political
milieu. The narrative is shaped by
several pressing issues, one of which concerns the possibility of writing
literary history in the heterogeneous societies of the southern African
region. Here the study concurs with David Perkins's view that the question of whether literary history
is possible ‘is really whether any construction of a literary past can meet our
present criteria of plausibility. A
judgment of more or less[1] Such an
investigation seeks coherence within parameters that have come to be delineated
as ‘postcolonial'. By this I do not mean
studies of the empire writing back to the centre. Neither do I grant styles of representation
alone the influence or force to effect material change in the surrounding
environment. (These are guiding
principles of postcolonial studies in academic institutions.)[2] I refer,
rather, to conditions of extreme differentiation in the same social, economic
and expressive space. In southern Africa
as in many configurations of the South of the world the traditional, the modern
and the postmodern exist audibly and visibly, in simultaneous and antagonist
relationships, in the daily life of the present day. The cellphone is as ubiquitous in the spaza
shops of Soweto as in the sphere of e-commerce. As the urban rich
purchases 4x4s, the rural poor remains mired in poverty.
is required'.
This leads in
literary-critical discussion to questions such as: can Shaka's royal praises in their military
aggrandisement be recovered to creative purpose in societies struggling to
institute democratic governance? What
significance, comparatively speaking, do we allow the songs of the Zionist
church-gathering and the metafiction of J.M. Coetzee? What are the strengths and limitations of
‘local' and ‘international' perspectives?
Do we grant the expatriate Doris Lessing, for example, a key
role in literature from Zimbabwe? Should literary culture in the South be
confined to the art forms of poems, plays and fictions? How do we - indeed, do we? - classify works
as major or minor, or elite or popular?
As these questions suggest, literary history is also literary
criticism. Its aim is not merely to
reconstruct the past; it is also to
illuminate literary works. Its function
lies partly in its impact on reading.
I mention this because
since the first publication of Southern African Literatures new works
have appeared in bookshops and on the stage;
new issues have provoked new responses.
Echoing a fairly widely held view particularly in ‘elite' literary
circles (that is, in the review pages of little magazines and the educated
press) Michiel Heyns says of Stephen Gray's revised anthology, Modern
South African Stories (2002): ‘how
much South African literature has changed in the wake of democracy. Some of the older stories still reflect the
political tensions of the old dispensation...but in general what we have here is
a collection facing up to a South Africa without the ready-made topic of
apartheid.'[3] And Elaine Pearson in her review of the
volume of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to ‘South African Fiction after
Apartheid' notes that ‘literature since 1990 has taken upon itself the task of articulating
[the] larger predicament. Its fields are
the experiential, ethical, and political ambiguities of transition: the tension between memory and amnesia. It emphasises the imperative of breaking
silences necessitated by long years of struggle, the refashioning of identities
caught between stasis and change, and the role of culture - or representation -
in limiting or enabling new forms of understanding.'[4]
Such observations betray
on the part of commentators, however, as much a desire as an actuality. It is possible, of course, by selective
example to depict a sea change. In this,
the short story and the poem are perhaps not the best markers. Their intense, ‘individualistic' forms have
always escaped the ‘ready-made topic of apartheid'. The ‘larger predicament, the experiential,
ethical and political ambiguities of transition', for example, provide a fair
description of Douglas Livingstone's poetry. To which one might add: the stylistically innovative. The description would apply similarly to many
other writers during apartheid including Gordimer, Coetzee, and Schoeman. And to many ‘before' apartheid such as Roy Campbell, Herman Charles Bosman, and William Plomer. All of these ‘names' continue to have
prominence on the shelves of Exclusive Books.
We have had since 1990 new works by Gordimer, Coetzee, Brink,
Breytenbach, Schoeman, Joubert, Fugard, and others of established reputation in
which, if the time is now transition, the difficulties of being white in Africa
remain a core concern. Matters of
identity, exile and home characterise, also, novels by younger writers like Achmat Dangor, Ivan Vladislavić, Zoë Wicomb, and, in Zimbabwe, Yvonne Vera. Interestingly, the recent claim that Vera undercuts the
‘master-narratives of heroic acts' could be applied with modification to the
earlier fiction of both Chenjerai Hove and Tsitsi Dangarembga.[5] A Black Consciousness priority of the 1970s
- the recovery of African dignity - is utilised to creative effect in the
fiction of Zakes Mda. There is a continuation of a trend identified
in Southern African Literatures:
a less guilt-stricken, less selfconscious response to the arts/politics
dilemma on the part of several younger writers than had characterised the
sensibilities of their predecessors in the struggle years of the 1970s and
1980s. There are, in consequence, the
bizarre, zany, at times hit-or-miss stories of ‘dislocation' by Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, and Riana Scheepers; there is the African-English ‘throwaway'
poetry of Seitlhamo Motsapi, Kgafela oa Magogodi
and Lesego Rampolokeng. One may detect a recurrent concern with the
issue of centring and marginalisation.
At the same time, one is reminded that the BC affiliations of a previous
generation always took cognisance of what in the 1990s began to be called the
local/global debate.[6]
The point is that
despite the allure of a wider civic space, there remain intractable connections
between the past and the present. Graft
in the current order, crime, the AIDS pandemic, the new social movements, the
paranoia of senior Big Men (Mugabe, Nujoma) might strike us as recent
phenomena, especially when subjected to the biting comedy of Pieter-Dirk
Uys. But it is not so new that
inter-racial contact remains obsessed with forms of domination and
subservience, or stark articulations of defiance. The rap words of the group, Prophets of da
City, give new rhythms to an old complaint:
that the mean streets of the deprived, whether in pre- or post-apartheid
South Africa, remain mean and
deprived. One of the more powerful books
of recent years, Antjie Krog's The Country of my
Skull (1998), in which she turns testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to question her own Afrikaner identity, owes a clear debt to the
understanding of our history. So in fact
does the magical realist, ‘postcolonial' novel of the Angolan writer
Pepetela. The characters in The
Return of the Water Spirit (2002) realise that the Marxist ruling elite
never went beyond the rhetoric of propaganda:
rather than a concern for the people, leaders had a concern to line
their pockets with the booty of war.
Resolution resides in the mythic mode:
Kianda, the water spirit, reclaims from a corrupt history the lagoon on
which Kinaxixi Square in Luanda was built. The real difference between the old colonials
and the new Angolans is that the old order was white and the new order, black. But the sardonic perspective has long been a
feature of Angolan and Mozambican writers:
both Vieira and Couto recognised, for example, that whatever the grand
words of ideological correctness, venal ambition, the puffery of pride, and the
meanness of the spirit have a habit of characterising officialdom usually,
unfortunately, to the detriment of ordinary people. As in the past so in the present, the Being
of violence in numerous forms of imposition severely hinders the Becoming of
transfiguration.
Several politically
astute, post-1990 columnists (John Matshikiza, for example) and
cartoonists (most prominently, Zapiro) may have broadened the satirical lens to
see a single society of black and white princes and clowns. John Kani's Nothing but the
Truth steps decisively beyond his partnership with Athol Fugard to offer, on stage, a
wise and resonant contemplation of exile and return (the tenor of his play
breaks with the black theatre of the 1970s) and in William Kentridge's multimedia stage
presentations there are original uses of Western and African stories and
conventions. But freeing the self from
the burden of division is not easily accomplished. Kwaito music still regards its energy as
primarily ‘black and urban'; Lexion Kulca, or township fashion,
according to its street cred., now smart-entrepreneur designers, is rooted ‘in Soweto'. And in the literary field authors continue
mostly to focus on their own narrower worlds.
Whites know their upbringing in white suburbia (a suburbia where English
and Afrikaans rarely enter into meaningful dialogue). The farm as metaphor outside of contemporary
history still serves themes of belonging and belief. African writers evoke township living, or
rural tradition; Indian writers return
to either the security or claustrophobia of the Hindu or Moslem family; and younger coloured writers are less likely
to experience Richard Rive's nostalgia for District Six than Alex La Guma's
earlier inheritance: the gangsterism and
poverty of the Cape Flats. At the beginning
of heightened state repression in 1983, J.M. Coetzee with rhetorical intent
turned to the idea - or possibly, the ideal - of what might constitute the
‘great' South African novel.[7] The imagined world should be national as
distinct from nationalist. It should
characterise the society at all levels during the time in which it is set. It should employ realistic techniques that
make the work accessible to most of the reading public. It should make the local, universal. The challenge was directed at both literature
and life: at a society caught between
the realities of strife and the necessity of interchange. The challenge remains that of Southern
African Literatures. The book in the
essence of its argument - I suggest - continues to inhabit a recognisable
terrain, and I wish in retrospect to recount the reception that greeted its
initial publication.
There was general
acknowledgement, if sometimes grudgingly, that Southern African Literatures
had to be taken seriously; indeed, that
it could not be ignored in any project on literary history.[8] The study was reviewed in the major academic
journals in the field and went on, in the year 2000, to receive South Africa's premier
academic-literary award, the Bill Venter Book Prize. At the same time, the book and, in terms
sometimes approaching the ‘ad hominem', the author suffered a barrage of angry
retort. What authority - it was demanded
- had I as a white English-speaking South African to pronounce on Afrikaans
literature, or literatures in the African languages![9] The original Preface - as we shall see - had
anticipated such a response, though not the vehemence of its expression. One critic turned his anger into the mission of
pasting his review on the amazon.com website. The gist of his complaint was
that in granting value to works by black writers who - he knew? - were poor
craftsmen, I displayed (negrophilic?) bad judgment. I expected white writers (subtle, ironic,
international) to write like black writers (typical, direct, local). Or, something along these lines. The rationality of the response still escapes
me.[10]
Initial publication, at
least in South Africa, coincided, I think,
with anxieties and confusions about matters of identity in relation to massive
socio-political change. Whose language,
culture, or story could be said to have purchase when the end of apartheid had
raised acute questions as to what it might mean to be a ‘new' South
African? Conceived of in the years 1987
to 1994 the evolution of the study witnessed the trauma of successive states of
emergency, the dramatic announcement to parliament on 2 February 1990 by then
state president F.W. de Klerk on the unbanning of the liberation movements, the
vicious political rivalries between the ANC and Inkatha and, almost
miraculously, the continuation of the Kempton Park negotiations that led to
South Africa's democracy. The other
countries in the region provided perspectives on both pre- and
post-independence scenarios. Southern
African Literatures reflects the uncertainties and aspirations of its
time. It reflects, also - I return to
Coetzee's comments on the no doubt unattainable great South African novel - the
need to step beyond categories of separation.
In planning Southern
African Literatures I recall how inadequate seemed a companion volume in
the series in which the study first appeared:
the Longman Literature in English Series. Working strictly within the designation ‘in
English', W.J. Keith's Canadian Literature in English (1985) either had
to or wished to ignore the oral past of Inuit tradition and, because
English-Canadian and French-Canadian authors had little to say to one another,
to present a very partial picture of a ‘multicultural' Canadian society. My premise in contrast was that although
various elements of literary life might have found few interstices, the
contribution of literature to the entire society required the critic to
construct necessary intervening spaces:
spaces in which the reader could be alerted to arrangements of
difference within the single map. This
contradicted the aims of a national research project, then in its planning
stages in South Africa. The state-funded research body, the Centre
for Science Development (now the National Research Foundation), had envisaged a
series of language-based literary studies, each volume of which was meant to
describe the literary output of one of the several ethnic groups. A volume on Afrikaans literature was to
occupy 80 000 words; a volume on
South African English literature, 70 000 words; Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho literature were to be
granted 40 000 words each; and, at
the end, Venda literature would be
given 5 000 words. However well
intentioned, the project - which did not fully realise itself - risked
replicating the ‘baasskap' hierarchies of the old South Africa.[11] The author of Canadian Literature in
EnglishSouthern
African Literatures attempts to
counter the usual practice of producing separate studies on black literature
and white literature, oral literature and written literature, English-language
literature and Afrikaans literature, and on the literatures of the several
African languages.
may not have been able to convince Longman to adopt a flexible
interpretation of its own designation, ‘in English'. The sight of Mandela walking free from
prison convinced the publishers that in southern Africa, at least, fresh
possibilities could be entertained.
The attempt to present
an ‘integrative' history, however, did not satisfy those who interpreted the
shift from discrete, ethnic stories to a continuous story as the imposition on
our many differences of a grand narrative, even a national liberation
narrative.[12] Culminating in the collapse of apartheid such
a narrative, it was countered, would erase the contours of localities, or
different stories, and conclude - Fukayama-style, as it were - at the end of
history. Such was not my intention. Let me return in illustration to the
questions that I posed above as pointers to the overall objective. Were a simple or singular response possible
as to whether Shaka's royal praises could be returned as more than anachronism
to contemporary South Africa, indeed to the entire region, I would concede legitimacy
to the attack on a grand narrative. I
choose this example deliberately, for the role of so-called traditional leaders
- stoutly supported by the Inkatha Freedom Party - remains a particular
concern, in 2003, to the ANC government's modernising drive. Far from endorsing any singular liberation, Southern
African Literatures concludes that by analogy Shaka's praises constitute
one of our many ‘usable pasts'. So does
the impressive, though often ‘politically incorrect' poetry of N.P. van Wyk Louw. Just as the study acknowledges many usable
pasts, it acknowledges many valuable uses of the present.
The single
story/multiple story contention, nonetheless, may be profitably pursued. It strikes at the heart of whether or not it
is possible to write literary history. A
narrative literary history - the argument goes - must necessarily limit the
intricacies of the past (its many local stories) or it would cease to be
narrative. A multiple-story approach -
that is, the ‘postmodern encyclopaedia' - would seek presumably to
problematise the narrative and expose its artifice. In dismissing the single story as the
connivance of the prevailing power and its overarching theory of explanation,
the postmodernist - and in some associations, the postcolonialist - would
insist on identification with communities and localities, place, region,
respect for others, and their many stories.
This is admirable. I would hope that my literary-historical
narrative has not diminished the claims of numerous voices. It remains hard in situations still wracked by division, though, to move from local place
to societal space. (A case in point - as
mentioned earlier on - concerns the future of traditional leadership.) The regional resistance of many stories can
contribute to, but usually cannot alone bear the burden of, radical historical
change. The slide is to tradition, not
as history but heritage: parochialism
and self-referentiality in the face of larger social forces. At worst - and here the spectre of racism
easily rears itself - to sectarian politics, in which the identities of others
are reduced to small, though destructive, competitions for scarce
resources. As far as identity is
concerned, the aesthetics of identity - the image of the person, the people,
the group, the race - supersedes the ethics of narration: how to move from event to event in historical
time. In short, the many discrete
stories in the postmodern encyclopaedia do not usually lend coherence to one
another. This militates against a
positive construct of literary history without which there cannot be the move
to a next phase. And a next phase is
crucial to any condition of inequality.
To quote Karl Mannheim, a ‘class which has
already risen in the social scale tends to conceive of history in terms of
unrelated, isolated events'.[13] A class that has not yet ‘risen' requires a
reconstitutive project. The narrative
approach that shapes Southern African Literatures remains appropriate -
it seems to me - to the material conditions of the South.
As a result of the
original publication of the book, I was invited by several north American and
European (west and east) universities to discuss the writing of literary
history.[14] Interest centred on whether it was possible
in an age of ‘dissensus' to construct a ‘consensual' history. The terms are taken from Habermas by Secvan Bercovitch, editor of The
Cambridge History of American Literature (1994), a multivolume compilation
that like Denis Hollier's A New History of
French Literature (1989) is arranged as chapters in the book by numerous
individual contributors. In both
histories the organising principle is not narrative, but the dissimilarity of
the postmodern approach. Briefly, Foucault's rejection of
metanarratives (his rejection of the inheritance of Enlightenment modernity) is
preferred to Habermas's defence of consensual action: that the ethics of narration may retain a
‘never silent claim to reason'.[15] Yet in both histories dissensus is more
illusory than real. Almost all the
contributors - no doubt carefully selected by the respective editors - adhere
to similar, fairly predictable, politically correct sentiments and values. Despite the formal discontinuity, the
landscape of thought suggests homogeneity, and Bercovitch concedes that in the
writing of history ideology cannot operate solely as negative critique, but
must direct the search for a new coherence.[16] Southern African Literatures
subscribes to such an insight. It
declares its intention to temper a key concept of the ‘post-' challenge,
deconstruction (the suspicious reading of all texts against the grain of their
own purpose), with the reconstructive potential of the story.
Such an emphasis - to
return to an earlier point - sustains the axiom that literary history is also
literary criticism. Southern African
Literatures acknowledges that in times of political crisis, we turn with
determination to aesthetics. This is not
as paradoxical as it might sound. In
crisis the search is for temporal and spatial resolution: how to represent, how to be represented. Although the character or quality of its
textual evaluations have drawn little comment in reviews, Southern African
Literatures actually devotes considerable attention to the formal dimension
of the literatures of the subcontinent.
At the same time, it is prepared to ground imaginative works in moral
consequence. (One critic commented,
pejoratively, that I had written a ‘moral narrative'.)[17] Those who might have occasion to return to
the study or visit it for the first time, I trust, will encounter no evasion of
art discussion. What readers might
recognise is that after forty years of apartheid, or in a current climate in
which tyranny and ruination in Zimbabwe are paraded as the
‘third chimurenga' or liberation war, I remain sceptical of the rhetoric of
nations. I remain committed, instead, to
the admittedly difficult conversations of functioning societies. This is the theme that threads its way
through Southern African Literatures.
Little that has transpired since 1996, in either politics or art,
convinces me to revise the central argument of the book.
The study begins, then,
from the proposition that literatures in the individual countries have
tended to be defined and described according to separate linguistic-ethnic
units rather than to the entity of the nation-state. In South Africa, for example, we have South
African literature in English, Afrikaans literature, Zulu literature, Xhosa
literature, Sotho literature and so on, each having its hermetic sets of
assumptions, myths and conventions while there is little consensus on how we
might constitute a single South African literature. Possibly South Africa, where ethnicity was
both encouraged and enforced by apartheid, presents an extreme case of
literary-linguistic division. The
procedure of defining national literatures in multilingual, multiracial
countries with troubled histories, however, is problematic especially as a
fundamental requirement of converting groups into nations is lacking in all the
countries of southern Africa: namely, widespread,
multiclass literacy in a common language.
While the conception of a nation is clearly necessary to the entity
`national literature', what is also required is a strong self-awareness among
writers, critics and readers that an intelligible field of, say, Zimbabwean
literature or Namibian literature, or Zambian literature exits, or could
exist. In developing societies, in
particular, writers would need to articulate whether they actually felt they
were contributing to a national literature: whether their interests coincided
with so-called national allegiances. Institutions, including universities and
publishers, would be expected to air views on the shaping of canons or the
compilation of anthologies in relation to educational and cultural goals. Although themes or genres alone are not
sufficient to identify a national literature, there should be an awareness of
predominant themes and generic preponderance in response to the idea of the
nation. Such literary schooling,
however, exists only intermittently in southern Africa, and in the present
study the question is permitted to remain open as to whether the individual
countries may be said to be developing an awareness of national
literatures. The larger issue, to
reiterate, is whether literary-historical enquiry, in countries where nationalisms
or at least sectionalisms have led to tension and strife, should be based on
the model of the nation (originary, organic in its symbols) or that of the
society (institutional and technical in its daily work).[18]
Whatever way we
pursue such arguments, there remains the historical need to give literatures
from predominantly African countries their own priorities, and the term
southern Africa gains substance in several common
subjects and concerns. In the literature
of all the countries, there is the shared experience of colonialism in its
abrasive, economic form attendant on strong, permanent settler
populations. A consequence is the large
theme of oppression and liberation with people in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa having had to
resort to bitter struggles against intransigent, white governments. (In this aspect, the character and depiction
of southern Africa is closer to
that of Ngugi's Kenya than to that
of Achebe's Nigeria.) As a result of the colonial presence in all
spheres of life, particularly in education, the racial theories, practices and
values of Europe have featured prominently in the language and texts of a great
deal of the literary response. Above
all, perhaps, the transition from traditional to modern loyalties in
aggressive, industrialising economies has led to swift, often desperate
disjunctions in both literature and life.
Literature from southern Africa is broadly
about urbanisation, where the old-versus-the-new or the
rural-memory-versus-the-city- opportunity characterises forms of expression
beyond any stronghold of language, race or nationality.
The contours of the
different literatures in the region are encouraged to give the study its
shape: the title deliberately retains
the plural form. As my initial
observations suggest, however, I do not follow the practice of balkanising the
literature into discrete ethnic units:[19]
units that can be unwitting reminders of the divide-and-rule tactics of the
colonial legacy. Instead, I construct
the field on comparative considerations.
In looking at frontier clashes in early nineteenth-century South Africa, for example, we might
wish to ask whether Xhosa literature would have taken the directions it did had
there been no colonial settlement in Xhosa territory; conversely, whether early South African
literature in English would have followed its particular course had it not
encountered indigenous people around its early settlements. The questions in themselves are not meant to
be profound. We are reminded, nonetheless, that the Xhosa bard and the settler
journalist, though divided by language, literacy, race and probably sentiment,
were both part of the same story: a
story that remains open, of course, to different interpretations. When the intent in southern Africa is to move beyond the
conflicts of the past and chart new directions, the potential of the
comparative method to investigate the intersections of traditionally enclosed
categories seems to be an important function of literary history.
Of the countries
that comprise southern Africa, the largest
and most contentious is South Africa which in terms
of its literary interests, publication outlets and relatively large readership,
has virtually subsumed any literary identity there might once have been in the
neighbouring states of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. To take just
one example, there is a claim to be made for Bessie Head as a Botswanan writer;
the compulsion behind her stories, however, finds its force in the racial
stigmatisation of her early South African experience. With colonial institutions dating back to the
mid-seventeenth century, reasonably advanced economic and bureaucratic
infrastructures, and an active publishing scene, South Africa in the sheer
bulk of its literary output occupies considerable attention in this study. The next most viable literary culture is to
be found in Zimbabwe. Malawi, Zambia and Namibia have more
modest outputs. An impressive literature
by Angolans and Mozambicans, which was mostly published abroad, characterised
the years leading up to the freedom struggles in the late 1950s and early
1960s. Understandably, the output was
not sustained during the lengthy civil wars that in the post-independence
period sapped the energies of the two countries.
Despite or perhaps
because of the existence of numerous African languages, all the countries have
retained the European language of the erstwhile coloniser as the common medium
of communication in government and industry.
English serves the purpose in the ex-British colonies of Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Portuguese serves the same purpose in Angola and Mozambique. In Namibia, which was
colonised first by Germany and
subsequently administered by South Africa, English is
the language of official practice while Afrikaans is widely spoken. In South Africa, a union of
two British colonies and two Boer republics, English and Afrikaans (the latter
an indigenised form of Dutch) reflect the roles of Britain and Holland in the
colonial history. In addition to the
European languages, there are in all the countries strong languages in the
linguistic family of the Bantu-speaking people: the classification of the
negroid groups in southern and central Africa. As in the past so in contemporary times, it
is the indigenous languages, not the European languages, that have enjoyed
majority, popular speech in live, oral interchange. Predating both African and European people in
the region were the Bushmen and Khoi, who spoke versions of a click language
that is today virtually extinct. In
transcribed and translated form the legends, myths and tales of these ancient
people may enter discussion as southern Africa's classical
literature.
After an
Introduction that enunciates the principles of the study, Part One looks at
oral traditions in the subcontinent.
Part Two examines the literature of European settlement in South Africa up to the
beginning of the twentieth century. At this point a colonial literature emerges
with some persistence in the other countries, and Part Three poses the question
of when colonial literature becomes African literature in relation first to
early activities in Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique and then to South Africa's
`continuing colonialism'. Part Four
focuses on the demands that, in the independent states, have been made on
writers by the ideals of new nations and the pragmatics of functioning
societies. From such a post-independence
vantage-point, Part Five returns to South Africa: the problem
of writing in the interregnum - the time between the death of the apartheid
state and the birth of a civil society - gives impetus to a consideration of
literary activities since the early 1970s. The arrangement of the material is
roughly chronological, but I have interrupted the onward momentum to allow for
debates concerning the possessions and dispossessions of language, race,
identity and power that have characterised life in this part of Africa. In favouring argument over information, I see
the book as having educational value in raising issues about the efficacy of
literary study in a contentious social climate.
In universities in southern Africa, literary
study is still heavily reliant on criteria of description and evaluation
derived from metropolitan great traditions.
I hope my argument, in contrast, will suggest ways of focusing the West
through African eyes while granting Africa the importance
of its own centrality in the region.
Clearly, the terms the `West' and `Africa' - as I am
deploying them here - are not meant to denote essences, but culturally
conditioned terms in an argument: terms that in a highly politicised
environment can have both semantic and actual consequences in the surrounding
life. In receiving and answering the speaking
power of texts in a forum of enquiry and debate, the study acknowledges the
contribution made to interpretation by the critical activity and by a community
of readers. The implication is that we
neither reduce the work of the past to its past condition nor read it today as
if it were a product of our time, but think of the work as needing us for the
realisation of its potential.
With readers envisaged
primarily as fellow academics and students, I have selected bibliographical
material that in my opinion best serves the construction of university courses
on the literature of the southern African countries. In recommending secondary sources, for
example, I have chosen stimulating critical introductions that should provide
starting points for further study, and articles that raise key issues in the
field. Selections presumed that, at least at the time of initial publication
abroad, readers would be mainly English-speaking and, in consequence, the
General Bibliographies focus on studies written in English, or translated into
English, with studies in other languages identified in relevant end notes. Similarly, the entries on individual authors
concentrate on English-language contributions or contributions that are
available in English translation.
Readers are referred outwards, nonetheless, to details of all the
literatures of the region. Biographical
entries have had to be confined to authors who have important consequences for
my argument, and with the General Bibliographies presuming readers who are
principally interested in literature, details of other pertinent studies -
history, anthropology, etc. - are given only in end notes. (Whereas complete titles are listed in the
General Bibliographies, I have not in end notes included subtitles unless crucial
as descriptive guides: accordingly, Fishman's Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative EssaysLanguage and Nationalism.) I realise that aspects of bibliographical
convenience contradict somewhat the spirit of the book which is to regard as
less than rigid traditional disciplinary divisions between, say, literary and
political study, or major and minor writers.
Restrictions of space, unfortunately, remain a practical
consideration. As general sources of
historical detail and debate, I refer readers at the outset to the works listed
in this end note.[20] appears simply as
To return to my revised
opening to this Preface, I also referred readers in the 1996 edition to an
issue that I had anticipated would accompany the appearance of the book: that of political/textual authority. Questions and objections focused - are still
perhaps likely to focus - on my authority as a white (male) critic to
represent, or re-present, others (Others), my authority or competence,
single-handedly, to interpret literature deriving from a range of languages and
cultures, and my authority or competence to survey the entire
subcontinent. Is it not inevitable - the
argument goes in summary - that my narrative will betray my race, class and
gender, or - to limit what is in danger of becoming a litany - my linguistic,
social and educational condition with English ending up not as lingua franca
but metonymic master-code? A
disquisition could be written on the issue.
Indeed, Henry A. Giroux in defining ‘border pedagogy' as respecting
the notion of difference in a common endeavour to extend the quality of civil
life advises critics and educators to unlearn their privileged positions,
listen to other constituencies, and try to speak in ways that those
constituencies can take seriously.[21] The advice at least ties an ideal to a
practice. Border pedagogy, as articulated by Giroux, is certainly
consistent with the principles of the present study. The 1990s - after apartheid, after the
one-party state, after the cold war - still bear the scars of the near
past, and of crucial importance in translating experiences is the creation of
new channels of communication.
Such channels include
not only the comparative method, but my reliance on English as the medium in
which the book is written. Despite
African majority speech it is inevitable that in southern Africa English will
continue increasingly to delineate the terms of both regional and international
exchange. As many are not proficient in
the intricacies of the language, struggles of linguistic empowerment and
disempowerment will remain a key issue.
My contribution has been in my own usage to try to avoid signalling any
master code (as mentioned above) and to aim at a plain, serviceable style that
may be understood beyond the borders of the specialist journal.
I could not have written
this book without insights gleaned from many of my colleagues. In some instances, acknowledgement is
explicit; in other instances, I have
probably absorbed their thoughts into my own deliberations. For key observations on literary history in
southern Africa - the comparative method, translation as cultural intervention,
politics as period marker, literature as rhetorical field - I am indebted
especially to articles over the years by Tim Couzens, Albert S. Gérard, Stephen
Gray, Isabel Hofmeyr, A.C. Jordan, Preben Kaarsholm, Es'kia Mphahlele, Kelwyn
Sole and Landeg White. I am also
indebted to several scholars for their comprehensive accounts: Ruth Finnegan, George Fortune and Aaron C.
Hodza, Albert S. Gérard, D.B. Ntuli and C.F. Swanepoel, C.M.S. Nyembezi, Jeff
Opland and B.W. Vilakazi (African-language literature), Jack Cope and J.C.
Kannemeyer (Afrikaans literature), Flora Veit-Wild (Zimbabwean literature) and,
on Portuguese-African literature, Manuel Ferreira, Russell G. Hamilton and
Gerald M. Moser. There are in addition
the many excellent articles that, in literary journals in the 1980s, saw the
criticism of African literature achieve perceptiveness and purpose. Despite the many necessary borrowings, I hope
I have offered something fresh and challenging in what is the first study to
consider all the literatures - oral and written, in the various languages - of
the several countries of southern Africa.
I wish to acknowledge
the contributions of translators of texts from one southern African language to
another, Catherine Dubbeld, Chief Subject Librarian (University of Natal,
Durban), who compiled the Index, and Chris Parsons and Suzé Nunes who checked
African-language and Portuguese orthography, respectively. I wish also to acknowledge the research
funding granted to me by the University of Natal
and what is now the National Research Foundation (South Africa). Lastly, I
wish to thank Longman Publishers for returning copyright to me and thus
permitting the study to be reprinted by a publisher in southern Africa.
Notes
[1]
Perkins,
Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore,
1993), p.17.
[2] See B. Ashcroft,
G.
Griffiths
and H. Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London,
1989) and H.K. Bhabha,
The Location of Culture (London,
1994). For a ‘materialist' as opposed to
‘representational' emphasis see A. Ahmad, In Theory (London, 1992), D.
Harvey, The Condition of PostmodernityPostcolonialism
(Oxford, 2001).
(Oxford, 1990) and R. Young,
[3]
Heyns, ‘Relief from that Ready-made
Topic, Apartheid', Sunday Independent (26 January 2003),
p.18.
[4]
Pearson,
‘Review MFS: Modern Fiction Studies,
46 (1) Spring 2000: South African
Fiction after Apartheid', Nelm [National English Literary Museum] News
(December 2001).
[5]
R.
Muponde
and M.
Taruvinga
(eds), Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne
Vera (Oxford,
2002), xi.
[6]
For a consideration of a
‘post-apartheid' perspective, as it might apply to poetry, see M.
Chapman
(ed.), The New Century of South African Poetry (Johannesburg,
2002).
[7]
See Southern African Literatures,
p.407.
[8]
See, for example, L. Chrisman, ‘New
Literary Histories from the New South Africa', Current Writing, vol. 8,
no. 2 (1996); A. Coetzee, ‘Southern
African Literatures', Alternation, vol. 3, no. 2 (1996); L. de Kock, ‘An Impossible History', English
in Africa, vol. 24, no.1 (1997); S.
Gray, ‘Opening Southern African Studies Post-apartheid', Research in African
Literatures, vol. 30, no. 1 (Spring 1999);
J. McLeod, ‘Usable Pasts', English, vol. 46, no. 185 (1997); V. Nemoianu, ‘Southern African Literatures',
The Comparatist, vol. 21 (1997);
H. van Vuuren, ‘Southern African Literatures', Journal of
Literary Studies, vol. 13, nos. 1 & 2 (1997); T. Voss, ‘Southern African Literatures',
English Academy Review, no. 14 (1997).
[9]
This was the tenor of a session
devoted to ‘writing literary history' at the conference Literary Studies at the
Crossroads, University
of South Africa,
Pretoria
(20-21 February, 1997). Proceedings in Journal of Literary Studies, vol.
13, nos. 1 & 2 (1997), pp.210-253.
[10]
S.
Crehan,
‘Broken English', Southern African Review of Books (July-August, 1996).
[11]
The result of the project was three
short surveys in English: J. Kannemeyer,
History of Afrikaans Literature (t) (Pietermaritzburg,
1993); D. Ntuli and C. Swanepoel, Southern
African Literature in African Languages (Pretoria, 1993); and M. van Wyk Smith, Grounds of
Contest: A Survey of South African
English Literature (Cape Town, 1990).
[12]
See M.
Green's
comments at the symposium, South African Literary History: Totality and/or
Fragment, Institute
of Cultural Studies,
University of Essen,
Germany
(July 1996), as reported by S.
Meyer,
"Literary History: A Thing of the
Present', Current Writing, vol. 8, no. 2 (1996), p.157. See also L.
de Kock
[n.8, above] and ‘The Central South African Story, or Many Stories?: A Response to Michael
Chapman's
"Red People and School People from Ntsikana to Mandela"',
English Academy Review, vol. 10 (1993).
See several essays in Rethinking South African Literary History,
(eds), J.
Smit,
J.
van Wyk
and J-P Wade (Durban,
1996).
[13]
Mannheim,
Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936), pp.129-130.
[14]
Papers were delivered at the
following universities: Ohio,
Emory, Toronto,
Zürich, Basle, Venice,
Mascarata, Palacky (Czech
Republic) and The
West-Timişoara (Romania). The gist of the argument is contained in M.
Chapman,
‘The Problem of Identity: South
Africa, Storytelling, and
Literary History', New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 1 (1998),
pp.85-99.
[15]
See J.
Habermas,
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Oxford,
1987).
[16]
See S.
Bercovitch's discussion of the principles informing
The Cambridge History of American Literature in ‘The Problem of Ideology
in American Literary History', Critical Inquiry, vol. 12 (1986),
pp.631-652.
[17]
A.
Coetzee
[n.8, above], p.235.
[18]
On the issue of nations and
literature generally see: B. Anderson, Imagined
CommunitiesNation and Narration (London, 1990), B. Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse
of the Nation State (London, 1992), J. Degenaar, `Nationalism, Liberalism
and Pluralism', in J. Butler, R. Elphick and D. Welsh, eds, Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its
History and Prospects (Middletown & Cape Town, 1987), J. Degenaar, Nations and Nationalism: The Myth of a South
African Nation (IDASA Occasional Paper, Cape Town, 1987), R. Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Boston, 1962),
J.A. Fishman, A.C.A. Ferguson and J.D. Gupta (eds), Language Problems of Developing Nations (New York, 1968), J.A.
Fishman, Language and Nationalism
(Rowley, 1973), S. Gikandi, `The Politics and Poetics of National Formation',
in A. Rutherford (ed.), From Commonwealth
to Post-Colonial (Sydney, 1992), E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990), B. Lindfors,
`Are there any national literatures in sub-Saharan Black Africa yet?', English in Africa, vol.2, no.2 (1975).
(London, 1983), H.K. Bhaba, ed.,
[19]
See General Bibliographies ii)
`Descriptive, thematic, critical, theoretical surveys', where titles will
usually indicate a focus on a specific language or race, or on written or oral
literature. Literature and Society in South Africa (ed.), L. White and T.
Couzens, offers `case study' essays on literature in several languages as well
as in both oral and written forms.
[20]
J. Grace and J. Laffin, Fontana Dictionary of Africa since 1960
(London, 1991), P. Williams and B. Hackland, The Dictionary of Contemporary Politics of Southern Africa (London,
1989), R. Oliver (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Africa, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1977), J.D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa (Cape Town
and London, 1987), J. Pampallis, Foundations
of the New South AfricaThe Making of the South African Past: Major
Historians on Race and Class (Cape Town, 1988), M. Wilson and L. Thompson
(eds), The Oxford History of South Africa,
2 vols. (Oxford, 1969, 1971). See also
several titles in the Penguin African Library and the series `Perspectives on Southern
Africa' by the University
of California Press.
(Cape Town, 1991), C. Saunders,
[21]
Giroux, Border Crossings:
Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York, 1992), p.27.
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