The Literature of Combat

Abstract

One of the products of the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its establishment of a black identity in South Africa, was a consciousness of the ideological function of literature in maintaining the hegemony of the ruling group in the society — a consciousness, that is, not among professional critics and theorists, but among the writers themselves. Black writers, by their questionings and experiments with form and genre, were able to lay bare the naturalising processes at work in accepted literary forms and genres (usually of western derivation) which contributed to their people’s subjugation, and to establish a search for alternatives that would counteract the cultural onslaught of white domination and serve the evolution of an ideology geared to the needs and aims of a black proletariat and rural population.