Table Of ContentEdited by Landeg White and Tim Couzens
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
IN SOUTH AFRICA
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Longman Studies in African Literature
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EDITED BY LANDEC WHITE AND TIM COUZENS
LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
IN SOUTH AFRICA
Longman>»
LONGMAN GROUP LIMITED,
Longman House,
Burnt Mill, Harlow,
Essex CM20 2JE,
England
and Associated Companies
throughout the World.
Published in the United States of
America by Longman Inc., New York
First published 1984
© Longman Group Limited 1984
All rights reserved; no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the Publishers.
ISBN 0 582 644267 (cased)
ISBN 0 582 644275 (paper)
Set in 10/llpt Linotron Baskerville
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Literature and Society in South Africa.
Includes index.
1. South African literature-History and criticism-
Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Literature and society
-South Africa-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. South
African literature-Social aspects-Addresses, essays,
lectures. I. Couzens, Tim. II. White, Landeg.
PL8014.S6L5 1984 809'.8968 84-831
ISBN 0-582-64426-7
ISBN 0-582-64427-5 (pbk.)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Literature and society in South Africa.-
(Longman studies in African literature)
1. South African literature (English)-
20th century-History and criticism
2. Afrikaans literature-19th century-
History and criticism 3. Afrikaans
literature-20th century-History and
criticism 4. Bantu literature-19th century
-History and criticism 5. Bantu literature
-20th century-History and criticism
I. Couzens, Tim II. White, Landeg
820.9'968 PR9359.6
ISBN 0-582-64426-7
ISBN 0-582-64427-5 Pbk.
Printed in Hong Kong by
Wah Cheong Printing Press Ltd
CONTENTS
1: Introduction The Editors 1
2: The genius of Ntsikana: traditional images and the
process of change in early Xhosa literature Janet Hodgson 24
3: The art of being ruled: Ndebele praise-poetry,
1835-1971 Leroy Vail and Landeg White 41
4: Widening horizons of African literature,
1870-1900 Tim Couzens 60
5: Sol T. Plaatje and Tswana literature: a preliminary
survey Brian Willan 81
6: The theatre of Stephen Black: an example of cultural
discontinuity in South Africa Stephen Gray 101
7: No place for a white proletariat: notes on an early
Afrikaans novel Ampie Coetzee 110
8: Romance and the development of the South African
novel Paul Rich 120
Alternative Theatre: fifty years of performance in
Johannesburg Ian Steadman 138
10: The uses of traditional oral forms in black South
African literature Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane 147
11:^Writing in a fractured society: the case of Nadine
Gordimer Stephen Clingman 161
12: The isolation of the Xhosa oral poet Jeff Opland 175
13: Staffrider and directions within contemporary South
African literature Michael Vaughan 196
Index 213
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1'U1-
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Landeg White and Tim Couzens
When the Oxford History of South Africa appeared in 1969 and 1971, it declared
its central theme to be ‘the interaction between peoples of diverse origins,
languages, technologies and social systems meeting on South African soil’.1 If
in the light of more recent historical writing those words ‘interaction’ and
‘meeting’ seem more than a little bland, it is still true that most criticism of
South African literature has continued to work within the Oxford History's
formulation. This present book is called Literature and Society in South Africa. It
contains chapters on Xhosa and Zulu-Ndebele praise-poetry, on the ‘colonial’
novel in English and Afrikaans, and on black writing in the vernaculars and in
English. Is there, then, a single South African ‘literature’? Are there not at
least five literatures operating alongside each other, each with its own
traditions and conventions, even its own audience, and achieving only the
most rudimentary of contacts and mutual influences? To put the question in
these terms is to separate the ‘literature’ from the ‘society’ and in particular
from the fact that South Africa is a capitalist state with, by and large, a unified
and dominating economy. While the ‘literatures’ might see themselves as
separate and as expressing rival nationalisms with their own characteristics,
the pull of the economy is ultimately a stronger centripetal force than any
centifugal pressures at work. The shadow of South Africa’s divisions of class
and race extends across South Africa’s ‘literatures’, requiring a type of
criticism which acknowledges just who and what is blocking the light.
This book’s title, then, deals in singulars. Its chapters are a selection from
the papers presented at a conference on Literature and Society in Southern
Africa held at the Centre for Southern African Studies in the University of
York in September 1981. The conference was co-sponsored by the Journal of
Southern African Studies which has already published, in a special literary
number, six of the papers dealing in the main with non-South African topics.2
The papers collected here were felt to have a special unity which made
separate publication appropriate. Although written from different stand¬
points, and reflecting in their different methodologies the varying disciplines
from which the authors come, they have three things in common. First, they all
deal with literature produced in South Africa. Secondly, they all take it for
granted that although literature and literary criticism have a strong
momentum of their own they can never be autonomous activities. Literary
works are seen as responding to historical change rather than being regarded
as a set of discrete capsules subject only to their own internal, timeless laws.
The criticism of literature, in short, has everything to do with the criticism of
society. Thirdly, their scholarship is based on a belief that the best guarantee
of ‘standards’ is to investigate what is happening locally rather than, as
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LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
Couzens has put it, to fix one’s gaze glassily on six thousand miles away.
Which brings us back to the peoples of diverse origins, languages,
technologies and social systems. In a paper presented at the conference but not
included here, Ian Glenn expressed profound misgivings about the role of
university departments of English in South Africa.3 Drawing a contrast with
the 1950s when it was clear that the Nationalist victory of 1948 ‘put literary
intellectuals in the forefront of opposition based on linguistic and national ties
with England and on liberal issues such as press and academic freedom’,
Glenn argues that the last twenty years ‘have seen our departments withdrawn
into an official stance of political neutralism (Academic Freedom), separated
officially from the metropolitan centre (London/Oxbridge) itself losing or
having lost its central role to New York or Paris, reduced to a ritualisation of
past practice’. English teaching in South Africa has ‘regressed from
provincialism to colonialism’, from the kind of creative shortsightedness which
can lead to local figures being over-valued to the kind of moral blindness which
bewails only that ‘we are very unlucky not to be in England’.
At the heart of the problem, Glenn declares, has been the failure to come to
terms with the first duty of the literary scholar, the failure to question what
gives a book ‘symbolic value’, what makes it ‘literature’:
In universities, the book taught has become a sacred object defended by a
circular argument: this book is a good book because we teach it and we
teach it because it is a good book.
In fact, says Glenn, it is not English departments which decide a book’s
status within the literature but the struggle of the avant-garde against the
powers already in place. By the time a book arrives on the syllabus its impact
has been neutralised, its disruptive force forgotten: it remains there ‘frozen as
“culture” . . . minimally subject to investments or bear-raids by later critics
(“revaluations”).’ Thus, the contemporary South African writer who from the
insecurity of his provincialism is inclined to court ‘local academic
consecration’ is told he is wasting his time. Instead, each of the competing
literary groups should carry on ‘playing their roles ... as fully and intensely as
possible . . . struggling as hard as possible for domination.’ As for the
university teacher of English (Glenn himself being one, like several of the
contributors to this book), he too has a part to play - not as ‘anxious broker or
lay preacher’ but as ‘engaged commentator and actor’ so long as ‘he can bear
to live in his time and pjace’.
Glenn is concerned, of course, with far more than just the position of
English departments in South Africa. His argument leans a little heavily on
the obligation of the writer to remain in South Africa imaginatively and
literally (he has harsh words for the generation which left after Sharpeville),
and he perhaps takes for granted what ought to be further questioned - that
liberal values have not yet been overtaken by events. The core of his attack,
though, is on the state of the discipline itself as highlighted by the role it
occupies in a brutal and exploitative society. His remarks are paralleled in a
review article by Landeg White in a recent number of the Journal of African
History. Dealing with African literary criticism in general, White complains of
the lack of any real contribution made by literary scholarship to African
studies as a whole, the absence of work which matches the intellectual vigour
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INTRODUCTION
of debates in related subjects. It is, he says, ‘a stagnant discipline’.
Part of the trouble seems to lie in the state of literary criticism in England
and America in the late 1950s when studies of African literature began to
proliferate. The emphasis of the ‘new criticism’, of the ‘well-wrought urn’
and ‘the verbal icon’, when critics like Ransom and Empson and Wimsatt
stressed and benefits of close study of the text as artefact, led all too easily
to the assumption that there was some special virtue in isolating the text
from its social and historical setting. The perfection of art invoked its
timelessness, and timelessness could be demonstrated by ignoring time.
As applied to written African literature, the earliest to be discussed, this
has frequently meant that critics have set themselves no larger task than
simple exposition - a mixture of plot summary and praise. It became part
of critical strategy to apologise for the assumed anthropological
orientation of African novels of the 1950s and 1960s, and to set up such
status-claiming parallels as that Soyinka uses language like Joyce, that
Laye is Kafkaesque, that Armah shares Swift’s ‘excremental vision’, that
Tutuola’s novels are, like Wuthering Heights, ‘a kind of sport’. Forced by
the very nature of the literature to look a little further, critics have been
content to take their image of Africa from the literature itself and then
praise the literature for its ‘truth’, operating within such simple concepts
as the ‘traditional African way of life’, the ‘clash between African and
Western culture’, and the ‘corruption following independence’ - concepts
which must seem strangely innocent to the historian or to the social or
political scientist. Only recently, with the emphases on stylistic analysis
or on ‘commitment’, have there been attempts to transcend a criticism
based on personal impressions backed up by appeals to a Leavis-type
‘tradition’.4
Denunciations of Leavis and the great tradition are, of course, nothing new
and the genuflections to Althusser which accompany them have themselves
become somewhat ritualistic. It is clear, though, that the methods of close
textual analysis (‘scrutiny’) which dominated the criticism of English
literature for so long have, for all their usefulness, left important questions
unanswered when applied to the literatures arising from the colonial
experience. Whereas critics in England have long been able to take it for
granted that novels are a good thing and that literary revolutions occur largely
for literary reasons and, despite the limitations inherent in these assumptions,
have still had useful things to say about the texts under discussion, in the West
Indies or Nigeria or South Africa the first and most fundamental questions are
about the appropriateness of theforms themselves to the societies they set out to
mirror or to illuminate. In the post-colonial world, literary criticism cannot
avoid anticipating the text.
To take just one example: the dominance of the autobiographical mode in
African and West Indian fiction is not, as is sometimes suggested, merely the
product of egotism or of defective imaginations. It is a reflection, forced on
writers by the special circumstances in which they have become writers, of a
quality of self-consciousness, a nagging awareness that, as V. S. Naipaul has
put it, ‘there’s something absurd about the fictional form: it’s an artificial
activity, made-up people taking part in invented actions’.5 For such writers,
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LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
the problem of form becomes very largely the problem of establishing the right
perspective. Only by placing himself as author accurately in relation to his
material can the post-colonial writer convince the reader that his vision is
complete and that he is not taking the virtues of his western education (or his
European publisher) for granted.
One of the reasons why this is so lies in the peculiar legacy of English
literature to the post-colonial writer. The existence of this great body of
literature helps to mark out the forms available and to establish the language.
But there is surprisingly little of it which deals with Empire. It is astonishing,
in retrospect, how little impact the Americas and the West Indies, or India, or
Africa, have had on the imaginations of British writers. Elizabethan drama
and poetry profoundly reflect the impact of books of renaissance travel, both as
a source of imagery and anecdote and as a challenge to enquiry. But what
happens in the hundred years between The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe? Or
between Defoe and Conrad? To Isaac Watts, the existence of Hottentots and
Amerindians - peoples without ‘divine revelation’ - posed theological
problems of the kind that eventually gave rise to the Protestant missionary
movement; to Joseph Warton, the extermination ofthe Aztecs was a matter for
‘sentimental’ poetry, and the decades straddling 1800 saw a flood of minor
poetry and drama loosely associated with the abolitionists’ causfe. But to the
major writers of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, a book like
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,or the Royal Slave (c. 1678) is merely an exotic. There is
nothing in English literature, in short, to compare with Os Lusiades. The point
of this observation is not just that the novel and the drama rarely ventured
outside England; the real point is that those dealing with purely English
experience take virtually no account of the imperial dimension and that this
applies even when the social and economic changes they delineate are
intimately involved with mercantilism and colonialism.
The nineteenth-century English novel, that extraordinary ragbag for every
kind of social and political and moral concern, illustrates the point vividly.
Despite all the agitation about abolition and sugar duties and the Niger
expedition and Governor Eyre, it is securely and incurably insular (though
novelists off duty could be shrilly combatant). Indian colonels and negro
servants float through the pages of Thackeray as objects of casual comedy.
One of Mrs Gaskell’s characters refers briefly to Sierra Leone and
conversation stops. Characters may be despatched east, west or south, the
Empire providing a narrative excuse for an absence of five hundred pages, but
the moral and imaginative implications of such absence are purely local. Even
Jane Austen, normally so alert to every moral subtlety, sends the proprietor of
Mansfield Park, her idealised country home, off to Antigua for several months
so that the effects of his absence can be explored, without noticing the
implication - that Mansfield Park is financed by slave labour (though she does
note the point, perhaps, later: there is a gratuitous attack on slavery in Emma,
her next novel). Dickens, though dealing in novel after novel with the port of
London and with the effects of industrial capitalism, is even more casual about
the matter. The rough notes for Dombey and Son reveal that Walter Gay was
despatched to Barbados with the novelist intending he should die of fever; only
in the final two hundred pages is he summoned back to marry the heroine
heiress, having inexplicably made his fortune there. As late as Great
4
