‘Protest art’ – political art – ‘struggle poetry’

The 1960s witnessed a massive clampdown by the government on protest writing (and black writing in general – see Horn, ‘Right of the People’), resulting in authors being silenced and driven into exile. In the year 1963, the South African government introduced the Publications Act, ‘an extensive and repressive “security” apparatus [that was] levelled against literary production’ (Ryan, ‘Literary-Intellectual Behavior’, p. 293), which wiped out the writing of many important South African writers (see Kunene, ‘Ideas under Arrest’). And when black literature revived in the following decade, it looked quite different. As it was based now on the concepts of Black Consciousness, white literary orientations were no less denounced than the political values of whites: in fact, this new generation of blacks conceived of the western literary conceptions as an integral part of western imperialism.

In September 1968, Ophir: Journal for Poetry published one of the first poems of Oswald Mtshali (‘The Master of the House’, p. 7), followed by ‘What's in this Black “Shit”’ by Wally Mongane Serote (p. 16) in 1969, while Ophir issue 11 featured seven poems by Pascal [Mafika] Gwala (‘Kwela Ride’, ‘Things’, ‘Promise’, ‘An Attempt at Communication’, ‘Food for the Couple’, ‘Election Pincers’, ‘When it's all Double-You’). By the time Ophir published its last issue, in spring 1976, black poetry in English had again become a force no longer to be overlooked. When Staffrider was launched in 1978, there was a chorus of black voices in poetry.

Was Ireland a colony? If by colonization we mean the conquest of one society by another more powerful society on its way to acquiring a vast empire, the settlement of the conquered territory by way of population transfers from the conquering one, the systematic denigration of the culture of the earlier inhabitants, the dismantling of their social institutions and the imposition of new institutions designed to consolidate the recently arrived settler community’s power over the ‘natives’ while keeping that settler community in its turn dependent on the ‘motherland’, then Ireland may be considered one of the earliest and most thoroughly colonized regions of the British Empire. The initial process of colonization began under the Tudors in the 1550s with the plantation of the Irish midlands, continued with Munster plantation in the 1580s, was extended to the north with the Ulster plantation in the 1590s and early 1600s, and was completed by the Cromwellian conquest and land confiscations in the 1640s. In this process, the Gaelic clan system and the Hiberno-Norman (or Old English) dynasties were almost entirely shattered and the spiritual and cultural institutions of the old Irish order – namely, the Catholic abbeys and monasteries and the secular Gaelic Bardic septs – were also dismantled and replaced by the English-language and Protestant culture of the new elites. The earlier economic system based on pastoral herding was also eliminated as Ireland was integrated into the mercantile capitalist order that the European empires were already expanding into a world system stretching across the Americas and Asia.

The period from the 1820s to the 1870s is a problematic one for South African literary history written in English. With the notable exception of the poetry of Thomas Pringle, not much happens in the official genres and no single literary work survives as anything other than a period piece. If, however, one broadens the boundaries of literary history to include a variety of genres conventionally overlooked or marginalised by it – diaries/journals, letters, articles in the periodical press, politically motivated writing, for example – then the ‘field’ enlarges significantly. Envisaged in this way, literary history also intersects with the expanding civic infrastructure of schools, libraries, art galleries, museums, learned societies, newspapers and periodicals. In effect, since early colonial literary activity is simply too sporadic to generate those forms of continuity which we associate with a national literature, it is necessary to expand the remit of literary history to include diverse forms of print production and cultural practice. For similar reasons, the work of outsiders commenting on South African affairs may be regarded as indigenous insofar as these writers enter into the currents of intellectual life and contribute to the formation of colonial identity. The best known and most influential of these works was Anthony Trollope's two-volume South Africa, an account of a five month visit to the country published in 1878. The book provoked widespread debate among colonial readers – in itself an indication that colonial South Africans were beginning to conceive of themselves as a distinctive national group rather than merely a province of empire.

National dreams

With the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and, even more decisively, with his election as president in April 1994, South Africa set off on a new course. This did not mean that a unified national culture, bridging earlier divisions between black and white, between literary and linguistic traditions, between expatriate and local writers, or between the privileged and the deprived immediately came into being. Indeed, while optimistic terms like the ‘rainbow nation’ or ‘the new South Africa’ pervaded political discourse during the 1990s, more cautious literary commentators always preferred to use those terms in scare quotes. Loren Kruger, for one, suggested that much South African writing from this period should be termed ‘post-anti-apartheid’ rather than ‘post-apartheid’ literature tout court (“‘Black Atlantics”’, p. 35). More recently, scholars have found a need to mark a distinct shift in mood that occurred in the course of Mbeki's presidency. Some have even proposed the term ‘post-transition’ to describe the more disenchanted writing that has emerged in the new millennium. The implication is that we can no longer – nearly two decades after the official end of apartheid – rely on themagic word ‘transition’ as ’a convenient label to positively connote an evolution and to make and justify a social, economic, or political “lack”’ (Popescu, South Africa, p. 162). The experience of rampant poverty and crime, AIDS and AIDS denialism, and the erosion of the new democracy's moral authority in the international sphere has proven too dark for that.

In the special collections of the University of Cape Town library are over 150 notebooks filled with columns of Victorian handwriting: phonetic notations of the languages once spoken by southern Africa's |Xam and !Kung peoples with English translations alongside that run to some 13,000 pages. The record of a unique instance of cross-cultural interaction within the history of the Cape Colony, the Bleek and Lloyd Collection is widely considered to be one of the world's richest ethnographic archives, and the most important textual record of indigenous oral expression on the subcontinent. Indicative of the symbolic charge this particular culture has come to assume in contemporary South Africa, the national coat of arms unveiled by President Thabo Mbeki on 27 April 2000 carries as its motto a sentence written in |Xam, preserving the nineteenth-century orthography of the notebooks to record its various clicks. !ke e:|xarra ∥ke is officially translated as ‘Unity in Diversity’; glossed more carefully from a language no longer spoken by any living South African, it can be rendered as ‘people who are different come together’.

The disparate assemblage of texts, correspondence, photographs, watercolour sketches and other material traces that make up the collection resulted from the convergence of two very different groupings of people in late nineteenth-century Cape Town.

The first novel James Joyce embarked on could hardly be called modernist. Stephen Hero, probably started in Dublin in 1903 when Joyce was twenty-one, was to be a thinly disguised autobiography, stylistically undistinguished and immensely long. When he abandoned it, in Trieste in 1905, he referred to the 914 pages he had written as “about half the book.” Its planned sixty-three chapters would have told the story of a Dublin boy growing up in an increasingly impoverished middle-class family, throwing off the shackles of Catholicism and bourgeois convention, and embarking upon the lonely path of the writer determined to expose his society's failings. The title, combining a formula from ancient Greek tragedy with the name of the young protagonist, suggests the kind of ironic distancing Joyce was to exploit later in his career. It is hard to discern irony in the eleven chapters that survive: the accounts of the inner world of Joyce's alter ego Stephen Daedalus, and of his interactions with his fellow university students, are not mediated by any sense of stylistic shaping and verbal economy, and as a result feel too close to their subject matter to allow for the play of distancing.

When Joyce recommenced his semi-autobiographical project in 1907, it was with a very different approach to the task. He had in the meantime completed Dubliners, and in writing those stories had developed an art of economy and compression that makes Stephen Hero seem positively elephantine (curiously, Joyce pursued the two projects side by side, without any apparent stylistic interference between them).