South African literature is as varied as the country’s languages and cultures. It includes writings in English, Afrikaans, and several African languages, especially Xhosa (isiXhosa) and Zulu (isiZulu). It includes settlers’ diaries and travel journals, adventure novels about hunting expeditions and gold discovery, political poetry and plays, and realistic and experimental fiction. It also includes nonwritten material, both ancient and modern. This oral literature includes praise poems to African chiefs, folk tales, and prayers to ancestors.
Oral literature in South Africa dates from the time of ancient hunters and gatherers called the San, who lived in the region more than 27,000 years ago. Written records began in 1652, with the arrival of Dutch seafarers at the Cape of Good Hope. By the 1700’s, Dutch settlers had moved into the interior as trekboers (wandering farmers) and had begun to speak Afrikaans, a local form of Dutch.
The British settled in Cape Town in 1795 and on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1820. After their arrival, the English language began to dominate education, commerce, and literature in southern Africa. However, the most widely spoken languages remain the African languages of the country’s Black majority, including the Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho peoples, the largest of several Bantu-speaking groups.
Questions of race and racial identity are a frequent theme in South African literature, in large part because racial conflict has dominated the nation’s history. In the 1700’s and 1800’s, the Dutch and the British colonized South Africa against the resistance of Africans. In the 1900’s, white South Africans, the descendants of the European colonizers, tightened control over the Black majority. In 1948, the government introduced a policy of enforced racial segregation called apartheid << ah PAHRT hayt or ah PAHRT hyt >>. Apartheid legislation denied Black people the vote, limited their opportunities for education, and restricted where they could live and work. Political protests and international trade boycotts eventually contributed to the collapse of the white-dominated government and the end of apartheid. In 1994, South Africa held its first truly democratic elections. South African literature tells this long, harsh story of oppression and liberation.
Oral literature
San traditions.
The San are one of the oldest identifiable groups of people to live in southern Africa. Their rock art still adorns the walls of several mountain caves. The San speak Khoisan languages, which are characterized by clicking sounds.
An important record of San myths, prayers, and stories is a collection consisting of about 12,000 pages of material, informally called the Bleek Collection. The collection includes books and articles, as well as notebooks containing unpublished research. It is named for a German linguist, W. H. I. Bleek. He and his sister-in-law, Lucy C. Lloyd, compiled most of the material. In the 1860’s, Bleek and Lloyd secured the release from prison of several members of the San community. In the care of Bleek and Lloyd, the freed San recited ancient and modern stories in Khoisan. The researchers also interviewed other San. The two linguists, who had mastered the Khoisan language, copied the stories and translated them into English. The collection includes myths, fables, information about San customs, and personal histories of some of the San who were interviewed. Lloyd also trained Bleek’s daughter, Dorothea, who continued her father’s work on a San dictionary. The dictionary was published in 1956, about eight years after Dorothea died.
Today, few San remain because European and African settlers have forced them from their hunting grounds. San stories and prayers remain important not only as the earliest literature of the region but also as a record of the racial cruelty carried out against the San people. See San.
African poems of praise.
An ancient form of expression in southern Africa was the praise poem, a verse in which an imbongi (oral poet) praised an individual or group. Many such poems praise a chief’s military victories to his subjects. The imbongi also might criticize the chief and remind him of his obligations to his people. During the reign of the Zulu king Shaka, praise poems captured the drama of conquest. In 1828, Shaka was assassinated by his half-brothers. One of them, Dingane, assumed the kingship. Praise poems warned Dingane of invasions of Afrikaner and British colonists into the Zulu kingdom. The British gained control over Zululand after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. See Anglo-Zulu War; Dingane; Shaka.
South African writers have adapted praise poems to many situations. During the struggle against apartheid, supporters of Black rights used the praises of Shaka as inspiration at political rallies. On the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, poets offered praises to Madiba, Mandela’s clan name. Other praise poems honor entertainers, soccer stars, and even husbands on their wedding day.
Stories.
South Africa has a rich tradition of storytelling, with many stories passed down from generation to generation. Present-day storytellers have adapted the ancient setting of village life to modern settings. Many stories deal with themes of community responsibility or warn against the corruption of urban living.
Literature from 1450 to 1910
Literature of early settlement.
A Portuguese poet named Luís de Camões describes the voyage of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India in the late 1490’s. The poem tells the story of da Gama landing at the cape and encountering local inhabitants, farmers of San ancestry. After demonstrating his superiority in trading skills and firepower, da Gama continues his voyage. Camoes’s poem also includes an imagined scene in which da Gama meets a giant named Adamastor. Adamastor represents both the rocky headland of the Cape of Good Hope and the spirit of the African continent. Adamastor vows that neither da Gama nor any other European intruder will conquer the southern regions.
European and African interaction has long formed a common theme in literature from South Africa. Numerous diaries, journals, and travel accounts from the 1600’s to the 1800’s express anxiety about racial relations. These works include the Journal of the Dutch pioneer Jan van Riebeeck, which covers the years from 1651 to 1662; the letters and journals of the British writer Lady Anne Barnard from 1797 to 1802; and the commentary of the Scottish settler Thomas Pringle.
Pringle was one of the most forceful early writers in South Africa. The poems in his collection African Sketches (1834) deal with such important issues as freedom and captivity, oppression, and human dignity. Pringle offers a view of the cultural differences between the British and the Xhosa. He portrays the difficulties of interaction between the two peoples as the British Cape Colony began to take the Xhosa’s ancestral land. African Sketches also includes Pringle’s autobiographical Narrative of a Residence in South Africa.
Early literature in African languages.
During the mid-1800’s, Xhosa writers who were involved with Christian missionary activities began to publish material in mission newspapers and journals. The earliest of these Xhosa writers, who were fluent in both their own language, isiXhosa, and in English, published hymns, poems, and essays. They also participated in the development and publication of grammar guides and dictionaries, and the translation of the Bible into isiXhosa. The South African missionary Tiyo Soga translated the English writer John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress into isiXhosa and worked on revisions of the isiXhosa Bible. See Xhosa.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, Xhosa writers and public figures also began to produce political writings and translations of books. J. T. Jabavu, an educator and editor, founded a Xhosa newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu, and supported the movement for increased rights for Black people under the British colonial government. Walter B. Rubusana was a pastor and political activist who helped establish the newspaper Izwi Labantu. He was a founding member of the South African Native National Congress, an organization that later became the African National Congress, the main political voice for Black South Africans.
Books of poetry and fiction by Black African writers emerged at the beginning of the 1900’s. The historical romance Chaka by Thomas Mofolo appeared in 1925 in Sesotho and was translated into English in 1931. Allegories and praise poems in isiXhosa by S. E. K. Mqhayi took a critical view of British colonial authority.
New themes
emerged in South African literature in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. In 1886, prospectors discovered gold in the Witwatersrand. The discovery led to the industrialization of South Africa. In response, the issues of industrialization and urbanization emerged in the fiction of novelists. In the late 1800’s, Douglas Blackburn wrote one of the first novels about a modern city experience. In Blackburn’s Leaven: A Black and White Story (1908), a rural African rejects his father’s attempts to keep him on his people’s land, and he eventually works in the mines in Johannesburg.
After the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, Afrikaner poets expressed their sorrow over the British conquest of land occupied by the Afrikaners. These poets included Jan F. E. Celliers, whose verse described country life; Christiaan Louis Leipoldt and Eugene Nielsen Marais, who portrayed human suffering, especially that caused by war; and Jacob Daniel du Toit (also known as Totius), who wrote classical-style verses in Afrikaans. Marais also gained critical praise for his writings on nature.
Literature under white rule
After the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, South Africa came firmly under the control of a white government. The government imposed a harsh policy of racial segregation and denied Black Africans many rights. At the same time, developments in education, cultural life, and industry benefited white South Africans and brought a flowering of literature, especially works of fiction. Many writers examined racial issues.
New voices of the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Pauline Smith’s English-language collection of short stories The Little Karoo (1925, expanded and reissued in 1930) uses a biblical style of expressing dialogue in Afrikaans. Her writing captures the grim mentality of sin and guilt in small Afrikaner communities. Roy Campbell, in his collection of poetry Adamastor (1930), vividly depicts Black people as heroic figures in the landscape. He satirizes colonial society for its prejudice and greed. William Plomer shocked colonial society in his novel Turbott Wolfe (1925), which advocates interracial mixing.
Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930) was the first novel in English by a Black South African. Mhudi was published in English by the Lovedale Mission Institute, a leading publisher of African literature. Set in the 1830’s, the novel tells the story of a young woman named Mhudi and her husband Ra-Thaga. The couple are forced to leave their Tswana community when it is attacked by the Zulu warrior Mzilikazi, who is a refugee from the powerful Shaka.
Plaatje, a political leader as well as a writer, was one of the first authors to depict Africans as complex human beings. He reacted against the stereotypes of colonial adventure writers, such as the English novelist H. Rider Haggard, who depicted Africans as savages.
Beginning in the 1930’s, a group of Afrikaner poets called the Dertigers—or, in English, Poets of the Thirties—transformed Afrikaans into a versatile literary language. The leading Dertiger poets included N. P. van Wyk Louw and, in the 1940’s, D. J. Opperman. Many of the group’s poems focused on the spiritual life of the individual. Van Wyk Louw’s poetry collection Tristia (1962) delivers doom-laden predictions about the power of politics and money to corrupt a people’s soul.
Fiction of the urban migration.
Stories of migration to the cities and of modernization were central to African writers of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In Mafeking Road (1947), Herman Charles Bosman satirized the Afrikaner rural community. A number of writers dealt with the clash between Black South African traditional ways of life and modern urban life. They included H. I. E. Dhlomo, with his epic poem Valley of a Thousand Hills (1941); his brother R. R. R. Dhlomo, with his short novel An African Tragedy (1928); and A. C. Jordan. Jordan’s novel in isiXhosa was translated into English as The Wrath of the Ancestors (published in isiXhosa in 1940 and in English in 1980). In Zulu hymns, Isaiah Shembe combined Christian concepts of reward in the afterlife with African religious concepts of social well-being in daily surroundings. Shembe spoke to uprooted rural people of the need for moral strength in the shantytowns (makeshift settlements) on the edges of the big cities.
Apartheid and the literature of exile.
The Afrikaner National Party came to power in 1948 and ruled South Africa until 1994. The government introduced formal segregation in the policy of apartheid. Alan Paton wrote vividly about the destructive effects of apartheid in several novels. Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) brought the racial problem to the attention of the world. The book contributed to campaigns to isolate South Africa from the community of nations. See Paton, Alan.
Such Black writers as Es’kia Mphahlele (also known as Ezekiel Mphahlele), Can Themba, and Bloke Modisane wrote stories about jazz and life in the shebeens (drinking parlors). The stories insisted that, despite apartheid, Africans had arrived in the cities to stay and had become modern, urbanized people.
The South African government responded to the writings of such authors as Mphahlele, Themba, and Modisane by banning large numbers of Black writers. Unable to get their work published in their own country, Mphahlele and other writers went abroad to live in exile. Several Black writers’ autobiographies tell heartfelt stories of home and exile, including Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963).
Bessie Head, the illegitimate child of the daughter of a wealthy colonial family and a Black man, lived as a refugee in Botswana to avoid South Africa’s social policies. She produced a striking narrative of exile in her autobiographical novel A Question of Power (1973). Her short-story collection The Collector of Treasures (1977) combines ancient oral wisdoms with modern-day problems. See Head, Bessie.
Black Consciousness.
In the 1970’s, the Black Consciousness (BC) movement emerged. This antiapartheid movement promoted self-reliance and self-respect among Black people.
The BC movement gave rise to several new Black poets. Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali in Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), Mongane Wally Serote in Yakhal’inkomo (1972), Sipho Sepamla in Hurry Up to It! (1975), and Mafika Gwala in Jol’iinkomo (1977) used intense lyrics to describe the alienation of city life and to urge resistance to white rule. These poets chose to write in English rather than in an African language. Their poems’ gutter slang and African American blues rhythms strengthened the importance of English as a means of Black communication.
A new Black theater transformed the stage into a platform of protest. Using small casts and sparse props, the plays of Zakes Mda and Matsemela Manaka are characteristic of that style. A widely acclaimed example is Woza Albert!, written by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, and first performed in 1981.
Mtutuzeli Matshoba in his short-story collection Call Me Not a Man (1979) and Njabulo S. Ndebele in Fools and Other Stories (1983) use African townships as settings for tales of human destiny. Mark Mathabane’s autobiography Kaffir Boy (1986) tells the story of his childhood of poverty under the apartheid system. Life in the Soweto township (now part of Johannesburg) is the subject of the autobiography Call Me Woman (1985) by Ellen Kuzwayo. Kuzwayo’s book is an assertion of Black womanhood inspired by the Black Consciousness movement. It describes what Kuzwayo saw as the movement’s male bias. Kuzwayo’s book set in motion a tide of autobiographies by Black South African women, most notably those by Sindiwe Magona and Emma Mashinini. Miriam Tlali wrote the first novel by a Black South African woman, Muriel at Metropolitan (1975), later reissued under its original title, Between Two Worlds.
The dilemma of white Africans.
Several white writers asked themselves what it might mean to be a white African living among the Black majority in South Africa. The challenge characterizes the internationally acclaimed plays of Athol Fugard, many of which explore the injustices of apartheid. Similar concerns find expression in the satirical revues of Pieter-Dirk Uys and in the novels of André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Brink wrote a series of novels in the 1970’s describing the tragic consequences of apartheid. See Brink, André.
Gordimer’s writing uses many realistic details of people’s lives and relationships. Her first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953. She wrote The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979), and July’s People (1981) at the height of Black Consciousness activism. These novels struggle with the issue of how a white writer and citizen can best support the cause of Black advancement. The white government banned several of her books, but in 1991, she became the first South African to receive the Nobel Prize in literature.
Since the end of apartheid, Gordimer has continued to challenge assumptions of white superiority. Her novel The Pickup (2001), for example, portrays a relationship between a wealthy white South African woman and a working-class Arab immigrant. See Gordimer, Nadine.
Coetzee uses allegory, dark humor, and other techniques to help readers perceive the moral truth behind the facts of history. He twice won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s top literary award, for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and for Disgrace (1999). In 1997, Coetzee produced the first volume of an autobiographical novel, Boyhood, which examines issues of truth, lies, secrecy, and storytelling. The second and third volumes are Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009). Coetzee received the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature. See Coetzee, J. M.
The Communist antiapartheid activist and writer Ruth First made a striking contribution to literature about racial relations in South Africa. In 1965, First wrote her account of her detention without trial in a South African prison, 117 Days. First was killed by a letter bomb in her office in Mozambique in 1982.
Since the end of apartheid
Since the end of apartheid, publishers have reprinted many works of these formerly banned writers. A new generation of South Africans are reading such books for the first time. The works of the novelist Alex La Guma, the poets Arthur Nortje and Dennis Brutus, and the writer and activist Mary Benson remind readers of apartheid so that similar injustices may not be repeated in the future.
In post-apartheid South Africa, writers face exciting and demanding forms of multiculturalism. They must learn to cope with language and cultural diversity. The challenge for South African writers in the post-apartheid period is to find an appropriate role for literature in conditions of political crisis and massive social change. This challenge comes as South Africa moves from its white-ruled, segregationist past to a Black-majority, democratic society.
An important text to mark the new era is the autobiography called Mamphela Ramphele: A Life (1995) by Mamphela Ramphele, the first Black woman vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town. The book was also published as Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader. Antjie Krog’s book Country of My Skull (1998) provides a vivid account of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government-appointed panel that from 1996 to 2003 investigated human rights violations that occurred during the apartheid period.
South Africa’s authors write increasingly about the different aspects of South African city life. Such authors as Ivan Vladislavic use parody and satire to describe the changes in the cities and their residents. Zakes Mda’s 1995 novel Ways of Dying tells the story of a professional mourner on the outskirts of a South African city. K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe tell city stories from Black youths’ point of view. In Finding Mr Madini (1999), Jonathan Morgan examines how immigrants from the rest of the continent bend and change the cultures of South Africa’s cities.
