The Literature of South Africa

Abstract

South African writing, in both the vernacular languages and English, has an extraordinary position among the literatures of Black Africa. It possesses what other literatures lack—a tradition extending over several generations. Despite this fact, for a long time it was not thought of as an independent national literature, and those interested in its development had to rely on scattered, fragmentary comments occurring in handbooks dealing with the British Empire in more general terms. As a branch of English literature it is comparatively young (its development could begin only after the establishment of British imperial power in South Africa) and has hardly been able to compete with the other, more developed branches of British writing. Generally speaking, English literary historians have paid little attention to the works written in the overseas territories. Only recently has the so-called Commonwealth literature been more systematically studied. But even in comparison with the literatures of Australia and Canada, etc., it has suffered considerable handicaps. Many South African books were written in Afrikaans or other African languages (e.g. Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu). Creative writing in English only rarely touched on British reality and was not regarded as very interesting. Moreover, the competition with other English-writing authors was so great that certain South African “classics” have remained almost unknown outside the Anglo-Saxon world. Another handicap resulted from the fact that South African writing has never been produced by a single race. The literature of South Africa is a product of a multi-racial society and has been developed by white, coloured and black writers.