South African Literature Research Articles

Solomon Plaatje’s environmentalism: ecocritical perspectives on Native Life in South Africa (1916)

ABSTRACTSolomon Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916) has recently been reinterpreted as a foundational text for black South African history, politics and literature. But what importance might it have for scholars interested in literature and the environment in Africa? This essay re-reads Native Life through Rob Nixon’s work on environmental writer-activism and environmental justice and Jennifer Wenzel’s concept of “contrapuntal environmentalisms” in pursuit of three interrelated goals: to excavate the ecological subtext of Native Life in South Africa; to re-insert Plaatje and Native Life into the broader history of writing about land and landscape in the region; and to consider Plaatje’s importance to some of the debates about environmental justice and environmental aesthetics that preoccupy the environmental humanities today.

Immigration, internal migration and crime in South Africa: A multi‐level model analysis

AbstractA review of South African literature on crime confirms the lack of a study that considers the impact of migration on the crime rate in the country. The high levels of crime in South Africa aside, additional motivation behind the study has been the increasing rhetoric in media and by politicians insinuating the prominent role of foreign immigrants in the high crime levels of the country. While this is the first attempt to study this relationship in the South African context, it also stands apart from existing studies undertaken in the developed countries by accounting for both internal migrants as well as foreign immigrants. Further, the study claims the use of multi‐level regression estimations as an improvement from the existing studies on the issue by accounting for variance clustering across different spatial levels. In all the estimated models, internal migrant ratio came out as being positively and significantly related to crime rates across five different crime categories, with the sole exception of sexual crime rate. There was no evidence of foreign immigrant ratio impacting on crime rate in any of the crimes analysed except crime relating to property. Further, income inequality and sex ratio figure as determining factors across most types of crime in South Africa.

Letterkundige en wysgerige kanttekeninge by die transformasie-trilogie van Antjie Krog

Literary and philosophical marginal notes regarding the transformation trilogy of Antjie Krog. In her published PhD thesis, ‘ baie worde : Identiteit en transformasie by Antjie Krog [‘ many becomings ’ : Identity and transformation in the thought of Antjie Krog ], Jacomien Van Niekerk directs her attention to the issues mentioned in the title of her thesis. In the discussion of the trilogy at hand a brief assessment is given of the place of works similar to these within the South African literature. The work of Van Niekerk is appreciated as a contribution to Krog studies, and as a reflection on identity within a South African context. According to Van Niekerk, the concept ‘identity’ and the concern for the possibility of the origination of new identities, such as a South African, Pan African and even a ‘black’ identity, occupies a central position in this work. The work of Van Niekerk is aligned with postcolonial thinking on identity, nationhood and becoming, as well as the investigation of ‘whiteness’, and ‘blackness’ as the opposite of the ‘white’ Eurocentrism of the colonial era. Van Niekerk shows that Krog understands identity as a process of becoming. According to Van Niekerk, the ultimate aim of her book is to launch an investigation into nationhood, while simultaneously highlighting Krog’s rejection of Eurocentrism and the accompanying conception of the ‘inherent superiority’ of western modernity. A shortcoming in the work of Van Niekerk is the striking absence of references to writers such as F.A. van Jaarsveld, Fransjohan Pretorius, J.C. Steyn and Herman Giliomee, all of them authors who wrote extensively about these issues. This results in a particularly one-sided perspective on the past. Krog attempts to justify everything in terms of African thought. Her thinking often borders upon becoming superficial, emotional and ideologically driven. Sometimes it is even ‘propagandistic’ and non-intellectual in nature. Van Niekerk mentions the strong interest in African philosophy. However, both western philosophy and African philosophy are confronted with the same problems. In this article, attention is given to those philosophical problems that are implicit or explicit in the work of Van Niekerk. Among them are problems such as the issue of essentialism, the relationships between what is universal and what is individual, constancy and dynamics (persistence and change), the nature of the whole-parts relation, the question concerning identity-in-becoming, nation, ethnic groups and the state, the relationships between community and communality, the question regarding the assumed social constructs of human society, blackness and whiteness, and a postcolonial yearning to ‘become otherwise’. Even though it may appear that these problems are not interrelated, the way in which they are scrutinised in more detail indeed makes it clear that they do cohere, apart from the fact that all these problems surface in Van Niekerk’s work and in the publications of Krog. Ultimately all these problems are philosophical in nature. Investigating them does not elevate one or another ‘thought-system’ to become the norm for all the others. Rather attention is drawn to certain states of affairs, as well as exercising immanent criticism.

The Queer Son and the Declining Patriarch in Post-Apartheid South African Literature: The Subversive Symbol of Water in Mark Behr’s Kings of the Water

SummaryThis article traces how the character of the father in post-apartheid South African literature is symbolic of the spectral yet enduring legacy of apartheid and the types of rigid masculinities which underpinned the oppressive system. I use this framing to demonstrate the conflict between the traditional South African father and the queer son. Queer male characters, and queer identities within South African society, are represented as disruptive to traditional conceptions of masculinity and fatherhood, and act as deconstructionist elements within the home and the family unit. In demonstrating these trends, I analyse Mark Behr’s novel, Kings of the Water (2009), which focalises a gay Afrikaans-speaking expatriate character who returns to the country and confronts his father at the family farm. The symbol of water in this text allows for the queer character to resist the stifling influence of his father and to queer his environment, renegotiating a connection with the family home as well as with South Africa.

Reading and roaming the racial city: R. R. R. Dhlomo and <i>The Bantu World</i>

Scholarship on the literary inscription of urban space in early twentiethcentury South Africa has tended to focus on Sophiatown and the writers of the 1950s ‘Drum generation’. In this reading, the idea of Johannesburg as it emerges in Drum magazine is seen to contrast sharply with earlier literary renditions of the city as a place of vice and moral decay. In this article, I draw attention to an important but little-known precursor to this emergent tradition of writing and claiming the modern city, namely journalist and writer, R. R. R. Dhlomo. As the author of a moralising fable about the depredations of city life, An African Tragedy (1928), Dhlomo is conventionally positioned as one of those writers whose reading of the city would inevitably be surpassed. This perspective ignores the significance of his popular satirical column, “R. Roamer Esq.” which appeared in the commercial African weekly The Bantu World over a period of ten years. Concerned in particular with the urban and peri-urban environments of late 1930s Johannesburg, the column maps out a detailed urban topography. Using the first-person perspective of an observing and observant urban street-walker/roamer, it calls attention to particular sites of engagement and encounter such as the court room, the train station and the street as well as the more intimate spaces encoding black urban marginality such as the backyard servant’s room. In this paper I consider what forms of the metropolis emerge from Roamer’s verbal mapping as well as what kinds of city figures, topographies, movements and interactions are inscribed. I argue that the column grants particular significance to the experience, interpolation and movement of the black body in segregationist-era urban space, offering a striking early reading of the racial city as both a place of constraint and a zone of inventive resistance. The article makes a further claim for the importance of African print cultures as an index of urbanity, of African newspapers as significant but overlooked sites of city inscription and black urban life in which the boundaries between the ‘literary’ and the ‘journalistic’ are frequently breached.Keywords: R. R. R. Dhlomo, The Bantu World, city literature, satire, African print cultures, African literature, South African literature, spatiality

To Vote or Not? Testing Micro-level Theories of Voter Turnout in South Africa’s 2014 General Elections

ABSTRACTEmpirical studies rarely examine the reasons why some South Africans choose to vote at elections and others not. In South Africa’s early democratic elections scholars assumed that voting was an expression of group loyalties or strong party loyalties. However, the decline in turnout in recent elections appears to contradict these socio-psychological explanations. Using 2014 post-election public opinion data, the paper addresses this research lacuna in the South African literature by testing several theories of voter participation. It finds that the influence of one’s social networks and, to a lesser extent, psychological engagement with politics are central to voter turnout. Trade unions and churches, and political parties, despite their obvious efforts to mobilise voters, make little impact on the decision to vote. Media exposure is a weak mobiliser but perceptions of media bias are important, suggesting that people filter out or select among media sources to suit their partisan proclivities, and this exercise in itself encourages turnout.

Implications of a Learning Organisation for Social Justice in Poverty Stricken Communities: A Theoretical Perspective

The term “social justice” cuts across disciplines and theoretical orientations. Critical theory underpinned the study reported on in this article. Many South African schools, particularly in poverty stricken communities, still experience insurmountable economic and social injustices despite progress since the apartheid regime. The injustices manifest in poverty, inequalities and unequal distribution of educational resources, impacting on the achievement gap. While social justice is a concern in the literature, South African literature has little on how to apply the concept of a learning organisation to reclaim a commitment to social justice. The article argues that schools perceived as learning organisations are sites of social and political struggle that can promote and encourage human rights to fundamental freedoms for all, without discrimination. This requires progressive teachers and critical thinking by students to transform dehumanising social milieus into communities of participation embodying the values of progress and human emancipation.

Communicative aspects of South African literature : framing a tool of the struggle against apartheid

Communicative aspects of South African literature : framing a tool of the struggle against apartheid

Trends in the working poverty rate (WPR) in post-apartheid South Africa, 1997–2012

ABSTRACTAs South Africa prepares to implement a national minimum wage for the first time, a number of questions about the potential benefits of a minimum wage have emerged. However, most of the South African literature, to date, has been concerned with the country's high unemployment rate and not on the quality of employment. In particular, there has been very little attention given to one widely used indicator of decent work, the working poverty rate (WPR). Using the October and General Household Surveys, we present an analysis of trends in working poverty over most of the post-apartheid period (from 1997 to 2012). The findings reveal that, while income poverty has decreased, poverty among the employed is a persistent feature of the post-apartheid period and that the contributions of earnings from employment to overall poverty reduction have been disappointing.

Post-Liberation Temporalities, Utopian Afterlives and Three South African Novels by Masande Ntshanga, Mohale Mashigo and Niq Mhlongo

Exploring the ordinary has been a central concern in South African literary and cultural studies. The ordinary or everyday relies on the lived experience of time – on temporalities defined as the way we experience and imagine the relation between past, present, and future. My central argument in this article is that the lived experience of a systemic shift (which is an ordinary experience in post-apartheid South Africa), coupled with the utopian ideals that attended the liberation movement, has shaped South African temporalities in ways that endure. It is within this framework of how we imagine and experience time that I read three novels: Niq Mhlongo’s Way Back Home (2013) Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016). I argue that all three texts articulate post-apartheid temporalities as a type of post-liberation consciousness, or afterlife, born out of a successful revolution in South Africa. In much the same way that apartheid prejudice did not disappear after independence, nor did the inclusive ideologies of the broad-based anti-apartheid or liberation movement that can be seen in all aspects of South African cultural life. By afterlives, I mean how certain aspects of the past reside in the present, and specifically how the utopian discourses that shaped the anti-apartheid resistance movements live on in current post-liberation fiction.

Tax governance compliance: An exploratory study of the 50 largest Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed companies

In line with current international sentiment which promotes greater transparency, the King Committee on Corporate Governance in South Africa updated its corporate governance framework through the issue of the King IV Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa, which replaced the King III Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa with effect 1 April 2017. The King IV Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa now specifically includes the formulation of a tax policy and strategy within the ambit of responsibilities of the board of directors and states that the organisation’s tax policy must be ‘transparent’ and ‘responsible’. The objective of the study was threefold: Firstly, to develop a tax reporting framework that incorporates the principles of good tax governance to ensure transparent and responsible tax policies and practices in South Africa. Secondly, to use the developed tax reporting framework to measure the tax reporting performance of the 50 largest Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)-listed organisations in South Africa. Thirdly, to produce a holistic and strategic methodology for South African organisations to employ as a standard and pragmatic approach that incorporates the responsible and transparent tax policy requirements of the King IV Report on Corporate Governance. The study commences with a literature review of established international trends on good tax governance, continues by aligning these international trends with principles from the King IV Report on Corporate Governance for the South African context and concludes with descriptive statistics to measure the performance of South African JSE-listed organisations against these trends. It was found that less than half of the 50 largest JSE-listed organisations comply with more than 50 per cent of the disclosure criteria as recommended by international practice on good tax governance. Only 25 per cent of organisations complied with 65 per cent or more of the disclosure criteria. Of such organisations, 75 per cent are primarily listed on a stock exchange other than the JSE with a secondary listing on the JSE. It is evident that most primarily listed JSE-listed organisations do not meet international criteria of good tax governance. It is therefore submitted that the presented methodology may contribute to South African governance literature.

Imagining and appreciating “the long eye of history”: race, form and representation in Drum magazine’s serialisation of wild conquest

ABSTRACTNewspapers and magazines in South Africa are acknowledged as having played a significant role in the fostering of literary journalism and criticism amongst black writers. Drum is commended for inaugurating the flourishing of the short-story genre. The launch of Drum in 1951 was preceded by the departure of Abrahams from South Africa to England in September 1939. Yet Drum and Abrahams – through his novel Wild Conquest, travelogue and autobiography Return to Goli and Tell Freedom – initiated an important conversation on the limits and possibilities of the synergies between the different platforms and genres in print culture and the extent to which they can capture and navigate the divergent aesthetic and socio-political imperatives that informed the magazine, writers and readers. This paper is an examination of Drum’s promotion of reading and writing amongst black South Africans from 1951–1960 as reflected in its intermittent forays in the serialisation of novels. It uses the magazine’s interpellation of Peter Abrahams and his work during 1951–1960 as a case-study into the intricate web and tensions of context, form and theme as well as the genealogies of writing and hermeneutics in black South African literature.

Forming “affective communities” and narrative forms of affection: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer

ABSTRACTThis article examines Arctic Summer (2014) by Damon Galgut, a biographical novel focused on a period in the life of British author E.M. Forster. My inquiry is concerned with narrative form and aesthetics that limn affiliations between the two authors’ creative and sexual sensibilities and struggles, and how forms of affective affiliations are forged through narration and narrative stylistics. I discuss critical responses to Galgut’s oeuvre and trends in South African literary production post-1994, to introduce ideas about his non-conformist creative impulses. I reflect on hybrid narrative form, generic ambiguities, and aesthetics to consider how affective affiliations are fashioned in Arctic Summer and beyond the boundaries of the text when compared to Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010). Leela Gandhi’s thoughts on “affective communities” inform my argument that the representation of sexuality and bonds of affection in Arctic Summer enables formal and nonconformist affinities across temporal and spatial registers.

Table of Contents Vol 39, No 1 & 2 (2018)

Literator publishes research articles and essays on linguistics and literature in general, but focuses in particular on the (comparative) study of South African languages and literatures and other cultural phenomena across language, media and cultural boundaries (examples of topics would be: different manifestations of Post-Modernism, the interaction between visual arts and literature, the representation of the South African War in literature, language attitudes and language policy).

South African manufacturing firms in transition

ABSTRACT We seek to provide a more detailed understanding the dynamics of change of firms in the post-apartheid era through the examination of the results of two firm-level surveys in the eThekwini Metro area. This paper aims to fill a gap in the South African labour market literature: our understanding of the demand side of the labour market. We examine the characteristics of firms which have grown their employment in order to test the local application of firm and labour market theory. An important finding is that subcontracting matters for employment growth. Those firms in the sample that outsource aspects of production to subcontractors are more likely to have grown employment. The flexibility that subcontracting provides, in terms of responding to changes in workload, is one of the key reasons that firms engage in subcontracting. There are some plausible hypotheses as to how this relationship works. First, subcontracting allows firms to outsource lower-skilled work, and achieve the scale necessary to employ high-skilled full-time staff. Second, subcontracting allows the firms to access high-skilled individuals that they would otherwise not have the operational scale to retain on a full-time basis. We also examine the role of exporting and value chain integration in employment creation.

Confronting disillusionment: on the rediscovery of socialist archives in recent South African cultural production

ABSTRACTIn recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa’s socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia’s latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970–80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other “post-dependence” (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.

'n Boer in beton: "Hierdie huis" deur Kleinboer

This review article is an attempt to interpret and evaluate the novel Hierdie huis within a specific context, namely that of urban writing. This is done first and foremost with reference to Afrikaans literature, but also in a wider context with reference to English South African literature (e.g. Ivan Vladislavic) and to relevant theories like that of the city dweller (flâneur) in the critical writings of Walter Benjamin. In recent Dutch literature several novels have been published (amongst others by Marc Reugebrink and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer) that share certain motifs and strategies with Kleinboer’s trilogy and they are discussed in greater detail. In this article the focus is on this third novel in what ostensibly is a coherent trilogy or prose cycle and not primarily a rejection of the traditional Afrikaans farm novel as often is asserted by literary critics; in actual fact it is a creative renewal of this genre, although often in a parodical fashion. In conclusion this novel is described as typical of “metamodernism” in its quest for meaningful moral and philosophical “master” narratives, rejected in postmodernism. In this novel the main character recognizes The Other as a fellow human-being and his etymological quests stresses hybridity which implies that linguistic (or racial) purity is a farce. Postcolonial métissage is central in this novel and the conclusion is that the forming of new identities has seldom (or never) been described in Afrikaans literature as in this trilogy.

Symbolic values of the dog in Afrikaans literature

The dog is a universal, archetypical symbol of fidelity and loyalty. However, in literature—and especially in South African literature—the dog (as well as the hyena and the wolf) often symbolises the diabolical. In some instances the dog is also symbolic of the dark side of human nature, of dehumanisation and even of death. The canine symbol in Afrikaans literature has both European and African origins. When canines appear in their natural (literal) form in Afrikaans poems and narratives, they are for the most part portrayed in a positive (compassionate) way. As soon as they appear in a figurative (allegorical) capacity though, as a symbol or metaphor, they mostly represent something ominous. The ambivalent nature of dogs—they are both caring and brutal—is reflected in Afrikaans literature. In this article the contradictory (symbolic) depiction of canines will be explored in various Afrikaans poems and novels. This article thus falls within the framework of animal studies, the interdisciplinary field which analyses how nonhuman animals are portrayed and viewed within literature.

The dynamics of multicultural Youth Ministry in a changing South Africa

Culturally diverse youth ministry is increasingly becoming the new and important reality concerning ministering to adolescents within a Christian community context within South Africa and beyond. Youth ministries have the challenge and responsibility at the same time to effectively work with culturally diverse young people. This article reports on the findings of a qualitative research carried out on a local church in Pretoria, South Africa. This research provided meaningful insight within the practical theological realm as the current South African literature regarding multicultural youth ministry is somewhat limited. It highlights that multiculturalism is imperative in local congregations and that youth ministries may need to adjust their approach as they work with different cultures in a changing South Africa.

Liquidity and size effects on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE)

ABSTRACTThis study explores the existence of a liquidity premium on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and its potential interaction with the well-documented size effect. It builds on the stream of South African literature that examines liquidity as a standalone factor and adds further weight to its existence. Over the 2000-2015 sample period, this study finds evidence of a significant liquidity effect. Importantly, the liquidity premium is found to be separate from the size effect. Furthermore, the liquidity premium captures a different underlying effect than the value premium. The efficacy of Liu’s (2006) Liquidity-Augmented Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) as a useful asset-pricing model for the cross-section of returns on the JSE is examined and found to perform better than the Fama-French 3-Factor model.