All original thought has foundations and a traceable genealogy. Isabel Hofmeyr has produced, in every decade since the 1990s, a major book that has transformed our thinking across disciplines. I have chosen to name my reflection on her work ‘Transformations’ precisely because of her always transformative relationship to various moments and turns in literary and cultural studies, particularly in South Africa. My argument here is that why and how her work has taken such mercurial turns is ultimately traceable to her initial engagements with the ‘problem space’ of literary and cultural studies in South Africa.

I would like to tie the question of genealogy closely to South Africa because Hofmeyr's emergence as a scholar happened at a crucial moment in progressive scholarship in the country. It is important to remember that in the 1970s and 1980s she was among a generation of radical South African scholars – inspired by Marxism, feminism, oral history, oral narrative and cultural studies. Affiliated with various political and cultural movements, these scholars were armed with a sense that if South African scholarship was to ring true to the totality of its social and cultural references, then it was duty-bound to abscond from the archaic prison houses of Englishness and liberalism, and embrace the rich and multifarious expressive cultures indigenous to South Africa, especially those of its majority black populace.

Hofmeyr was also uniquely placed to address the problem of literary and cultural studies in South Africa by virtue of her long-standing location in the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). The only one of its kind, the department was founded by Es'kia Mphahlele in 1983, after his return from exile. Hofmeyr joined the department in 1984 and has spent her entire career there – in itself a unique and singular way to live out an intellectual life in the academy. Aside from Mphahlele with his substantial creative and critical work, a key figure in the department's early history, and certainly in the recuperation of major but neglected black writers of the early to mid-twentieth century, was Tim Couzens. His work on writers such as Sol Plaatje and the Dhlomo brothers (R.R.R. and H.I.E. Dhlomo) added significantly to the intellectual repatriation of black writers to the South African literary canon.

Towards the end of his first memoir, Down Second Avenue, Es’kia Mphahlele writes about the allure of exile set against the inhibitions that South African segregationism and apartheid had placed on his ongoing struggles for selfassertion as a man and an intellectual. In these latter pages of the book we see the emergence of Mphahlele as a literary critic. And in his second memoir, Afrika, My Music, his recollections of his years at Drum magazine in the 1950s are unassumingly peppered with his first substantial foray into literary criticism. ‘In 1956,’ he writes, ‘I began research for a thesis which I was going to present for the M.A. degree in the University of South Africa. My subject was The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction.’Although it first appeared as his master’s dissertation in 1956, ‘The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction’ also features in Down Second Avenue.

The temporal and spatial gap that lies between ‘The Non-European Character in South African English Fiction’ and The African Image (a revised edition of the book was published in 1974) marks substantial transformations in Mphahlele’s literary and intellectual odyssey. Along with the writings of Peter Abrahams, Bloke Modisane and others, his first substantial work, Down Second Avenue, would emerge amongst a corpus of works giving the outside world a glimpse of the textures of black life under the most persistent colonial state in Africa. Perhaps because the autobiographical form has been read as a ‘peculiar genre’ that ‘depicts the very social conditions that have given rise to it’ and as ‘South Africa’s most singular contribution to black literature’, Down Second Avenue arguably holds pride of place in the corpus of Mphahlele’s writings. Indeed, the works of Abrahams, Mphahlele and Alex La Guma acquired something of a canonical status in the education of a generation of those on the continent who came of age in the wake of independence in the 1960s and 1970s, without any immediate access to the lived realities of apartheid.

The essays in this collection were presented at a colloquium and panels convened in 2019 in celebration of the centenaries of Peter Abrahams (3 March 1919−18 January 2017), Noni Jabavu (20 August 1919−18 June 2008), Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi (6 December 1919−25 June 2000) and Ezekiel ‘Es’kia’ Mphahlele (17 December 1919−27 October 2008). All four centenarians lived rich and diverse lives and moulded careers that were protean. While Nyembezi remained in South Africa, the other three left the country at different ages and for varied reasons. Jabavu left in 1933 (at the age of thirteen to study in England); Abrahams in 1939 (in search of a less racially constrictive environment that he deemed essential for his pursuit of writing as a career); and Mphahlele departed in 1957 amidst increasing racial discrimination and repression in South Africa. Abrahams, Jabavu and Mphahlele each had peripatetic journeys, living for periods of time in West and East Africa, Europe, the USA and the Caribbean. Whether located in South Africa or making criss-crossing triangular journeys across the world, all four centenarians produced more than a half-century of foundational writing and cultural outputs spanning orature, fiction, autobiography, poetry, criticism, essays and journalism. Their writing was matched and deeply expanded by their participation in a wide range of political, educational, institutional and cultural initiatives that were aimed at fostering individual and group expression and development.

The lives and works of the centenarians provide a rich and challenging oeuvre that engages with complex historical, political and cultural experiences and questions. Noteworthy is the fact that the range and scope of their imaginations, reflections and social interventions span conventional disciplinary divides. This collection, in the same spirit, is informed by insights and approaches from disciplines as varied as literary criticism, cultural studies, history, political science, sociology, psychology and anthropology. The individual essays, in addition, are equally transdisciplinary in their perspectives and modalities. At stake in the collection are two aims: to explore the key texts and projects that the centenarians were involved in and to consider whether their legacies still resonate in the present.

In his memoir, The Coyaba Chronicles, Peter Abrahams describes visiting his friend, the newly appointed prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, in 1952, five years before the Gold Coast would become independent Ghana, recalling that ‘Nkrumah had begun to realise some of the hard problems. But he was still optimistic, confident that he could overcome them and that he would prevail’. The problem, Abrahams observes, was that ‘the tribal chiefs were jealous of their positions’ and that Nkrumah was underestimating their political power. He concludes the scene by noting: ‘this one, I felt, was keeping faith with our dream. I also felt he took his political enemies dangerously lightly. The idea for A Wreath for Udomo was born’.

Abrahams thus records how this moment, in which he recognised Nkrumah’s continued fidelity to the ‘dream’ of anticolonialism and Pan-Africanism alongside what Abrahams perceived as an absence of political realism, shaped the thematic core of his novel A Wreath for Udomo. A dialectic between ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’ is foregrounded through the binary structure of the novel: the first section is titled ‘The Dream’, while the second section is titled ‘The Reality’. However, following David Scott’s study of anticolonial historical narratives in Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, I propose reading A Wreath for Udomo through an alternative, related duality, that of romance and tragedy. Abrahams’ novel works both with and against the disruptive tragic temporality described by Scott, a view of time and history attentive to the complications and ambiguities intervening between actions and their consequences. The novel’s tragic ending offers a discomforting and ominous vision of the future, presenting a disillusioning conclusion that interrogates the ‘dream’ of anticolonial romance. Furthermore, when reread from the vantage point of the present, the unresolved, irresolvable tension between romance and tragedy in the text opens up our retrospective understanding of the ambivalent, contingent position of this ‘foundational’ writer at the time of the text’s composition.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P S King & Son, Ltd, May 1916). First edition. 1000 copies printed, 500 bound up for sale.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P S King & Son, Ltd, October 1916). Second edition.

Consisted of the remaining 500 copies from the first printing. Includes a new chapter entitled ‘Report of the Lands Commission: An Analysis’, bound in at the beginning of the book. Also adds two pages with ‘Some Opinions of the Press on the First Edition’, along with advertisements for Plaatje's Sechuana Proverbs and A Sechuana Reader, the latter co-authored with Daniel Jones.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P S King & Son, Ltd, February 1917). Third edition. Separate impressions for P S King & Son, London; Tsala ea Batho, Kimberley; and The Crisis, New York. ‘Report of the Lands Commission’ chapter moved to the end of the book. Folded map added as insert.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Kimberley: Tsala ea Batho, and New York: The Crisis, 1920).

Fourth edition.

No impression by P S King & Son located.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (London: P S King & Son, Ltd, 1921). Fifth edition. No impression for Tsala ea Batho and The Crisis located.

S T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969). Facsimile of Third edition.

Sol T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982).

Paperback edition. Foreword by Bessie Head, Introduction by Brian Willan. Sol T Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (Harlow: Longman, 1987). African Classics Series.

Abbreviated paperback edition, omitting chapters 22–24. Introduction by Brian Willan.