Writing and publishing in African languages since 1948

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521199285.031

29 - Writing and publishing in African languages since 1948

from PART V - APARTHEID AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1948 TO THE PRESENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Christiaan Swanepoel

Edited by

David Attwell and

Derek Attridge

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David Attwell: Affiliation:
University of York
Derek Attridge: Affiliation:
University of York

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Summary

In his 1966 study, Neo-African Literature, Janheinz Jahn refers to ‘the tragedy of Southern Bantu literature’ (p. 100), a linguistic category that comprises nine of the country's eleven official languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, siSwati and isiNdebele. Can it be said that this ‘tragedy’ persists today? If it does, is it because the development of at least five of the literatures came about through the initiatives of missionaries who had actually come to southern Africa to spread the Gospel – an act that lured Africans away from their traditional religious roots? Did the ‘tragedy’ persist and deepen after 1948, when the National Party seized power and the literatures ran into the repressive powers of the apartheid system which held them captive for the greater part of the following five decades, both sponsoring and censoring them into insignificance? And is the ‘tragedy’ continuing in the present under the African National Congress's democratic dispensation, whose brave constitutional acknowledgement of eleven official languages, in current practice, is amounting to little more than the selection of one language of record, thereby inhibiting development in the others?

In Jahn's view, the literatures must by 1948 already have suffered from the ‘pettiness of that simple pious world’ under the missionaries. However, it was the National Party's Bantu Education Act No. 47 of 1953 ‘that swept away the mission schools and with them the sparse remains of a semi-free literature.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of South African Literature , pp. 607 - 632

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521199285.031 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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