This chapter will not be strictly chronological and teleological. It is not an attempt to begin at a “beginning” and indicate a “development” to an ever-shifting present. It utilizes the concept of the “discursive formation,” where these formations were created within the political, social, and material conditions in South Africa. These broadly historical formations, identified by the distribution of “statements” within discourses, from approximately the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, can be identified as follows: Europe meets Africa; the indigenization of language; colonization; literature as discourse; the phenomenon of a “minor literature”; modernism and postmodernism.

Europe meets Africa

The creation of a written literature in South Africa – literature as a nineteenth-century European construct – does not begin with the canonical “literary” text. It will take its representations from the navigation texts and travel journals of those who documented the first meetings and confrontations in the contact zone between the indigene, the Portuguese and Dutch seamen and explorers. The travel discourses of the first Portuguese and Dutch navigators who sailed around the southernmost point of Africa, Bartolomeu Dias (1487–88), Vasco da Gama (1497–99), and Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1579–92) (see Axelson 1988: 1–8; Itinerario Voyage 1934), which record what seems to be the first significant impressions of the people and landscape of southern Africa, have to be read not only for their content as texts describing what they saw and experienced. They are also representations in language, limited as instruments of representation; but also powerful as textual creations constructing images of the other people as wild, barbaric, dirty, stupid, and untrustworthy.