C. Louis Leipoldt’s The Mask: Lost Opportunities and Cautions from the Past

Abstract

The Afrikaans poet C. Louis Leipoldt (1880–1947) left behind a writing legacy that is a case study of missed or lost opportunities for critical debate. Work that went unpublished in his lifetime reveals a painstakingly continuous literary project that opposed Afrikaner nationalism and populist fearmongering, even predicting future socio-political hardships and uneven development in South Africa. Many of Leipoldt’s criticisms of Afrikaner Nationalism went largely ignored or misread, presumably because Leipoldt was seen as a senior figure of importance in the Afrikaans literary set. In spite of the great amount of research produced by scholars like Kannemeyer and Gray between 1970 and 2000, revealing Leipoldt as a captivating public figure entangled in prominent moments in South Africa’s cultural development in the early twentieth century, little further interest has been shown. Speculation about Leipoldt’s personal life and his interactions with other established Afrikaans writers tend to receive more attention than the consistency and multi-pronged nature of his literary-cultural critiques of South Africa. These critiques are presented in his poetry, prose, plays, journalism and even his medical, culinary and travel writing. Now, at a time of strong intersections between identity politics, populism and sentiment, and with the urgent discussions around decolonization of universities and the literatures they teach, Leipoldt’s views from a century ago may be more worthwhile than before.