Southern African Literature Research Articles

Do freeze events create a demographic bottleneck for Colophospermum mopane?

Frost disturbance is often mentioned in southern African savanna literature, but it is seldom discussed or investigated further. However, it can represent an above-ground disturbance as effective as fire or browsing, depending on the resistance capacity of the effected plants. A severely freeze-damaged stand of Colophospermum mopane along a slope in the Venetia Limpopo Nature Reserve provided an opportunity to investigate the nature of freeze-damage impacts on C. mopane. Is this disturbance a possible demographic limitation of C. mopane preventing its southwards spread? Freeze-damage of individual trees was assessed according to tree height and landscape position — with lower elevations representing the most severe freeze zones and higher elevations representing the least severe. Lower elevation trees were relatively small (2.24m) and coppicing, whilst higher elevation trees were taller (3.65m) with no coppice present. No freeze-damage was observed on tree canopies above 4m in height. Trees<4m in height that had experienced 100% freeze-damage, failed to regrow to their original heights of the previous season. This is a possible driver of the pre-freeze height differences seen across the slope; with trees at low elevations having to recover from freeze events and subsequent topkill more frequently, resulting in a net decrease in tree height for that growing season. It appears that C. mopane has limited resistance to freeze events, and this may be linked to the absence of this species at colder latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Stefan Helgesson. Transnationalism in Southern African Literature. Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture

Within the broad perspective of the cultural, economic and political impact of late colonialism, Stefan Helgesson examines the effects which the migratory potential of print medium had on the lusophone and anglophone countries of Southern Africa where orality was the dominant mode of social and cultural interaction. Against the background of contradictions and sectorial interests generated by colonialism, the author posits that it is within this transnational arena created by the disseminatio...

Remembering Jean Sévry

Jean Sevry, who was for many years professor at Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, died at the end of May 2012. As a scholar, Jean was not obsessed with being in the limelight and often refused to conform to the norms which an academic eager to advance his career is supposed to respect. Yet he has been central in the study of African and in particular Southern African literature in France. Together with the regretted Rene Richard, his friend and long-time associate, he founded the CERPANA...

Om ruim in Afrika te leef

To live abundantly in Africa This article is a revised version of an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Pretoria on 19 July 2001. The paper considers the future of Departments of Afrikaans following the end of Afrikaner political rule. It is divided into three subsections: a overview of the close affiliation between the Afrikaans language, literature and Afrikaner nationalism, as well as the practice of Afrikaans literary criticism; reactions from the Afrikaans speaking community to the demise of Afrikaner political rule and lastly, tentative proposals for the continued development of Departments of Afrikaans. The association between Afrikaans and Afrikaner nationalism became so ingrained that discursively, the language became the exclusive domain of the Afrikaners. The democratisation of 1994 brought about change and weakened the bond between Afrikaner nationalism and the Afrikaans language. Responses to the new dispensation vary. One such response is an attempt at redefining Afrikaner identity, encompassing those whose roles in the formation of the Afrikaans language were previously undervalued (such as black, principally coloured, Afrikaans speakers). Other responses support an overarching South African identity. These public debates have corollaries in the debates on Afrikaans literature. The author argues that conscious steps must be undertaken to actively develop links with other African, southern and South African literatures; while at the same time institutionalised literary models, approaches and the demands of contemporary cultural practices must be re-evaluated.

Introduction

Introduction Peter Mwikisa, Mary S. Lederer, and Leloba Molema The idea for this special issue of Research in African Literatures was first raised during a visit by Ruthmarie Mitsch to the University of Botswana in 2006. After looking at the output of the journal over the years, Mitsch had noted that Southern African writing was not as well represented as other literatures of Africa. Peter Mwikisa, of the University of Botswana Department of English, suggested the idea of a special issue on this topic and asked Mary Lederer and Leloba Molema (formerly and currently of the UB English Department) to work with him. As work for the issue got underway, a number of problems revealed themselves. Firstly, none of the editorial team members had ever done such an issue before and were often unfamiliar with the processes involved in advertising the call for papers, assembling articles, etc. Encouraging people to submit articles for the topic (Southern African literature outside South Africa) proved to be more difficult than anticipated. We had assumed that scholars from these countries would be anxious to send their work in for consideration, but as deadlines came and went, we had to scramble to pull together sufficient material for an issue. Promises of articles came from Malawi, London, Botswana, Zimbabwe, the United States, and Zambia, but in the end many authors pulled out, frequently citing overwork as the reason. Secondly, once we had a set of papers assembled, we had difficulty finding reviewers. Again, promises to review came from a number of places, but again, as deadlines came and went, we became increasingly desperate to find people to review the material we had. In spite of promises to complete the work by first one deadline, then another, then a third, many reviewers simply dropped out of the picture. This review process took us significantly longer than we had anticipated. Nevertheless, and in spite of nagging email problems, we finally got all the papers, reviewers’ comments, and revised papers together, and this special issue of Research in African Literatures is the result. We preface these introductory comments with an indication of the problems we encountered putting together this special issue because of two things [End Page v] that became clear to us as we read through the submissions. The first was that the problems we encountered appeared, at least in part, to be responsible for the scanty representation of literature and scholarship from Southern Africa not only in issues of Research in African Literatures but on the global stage in general. Lack of intimate familiarity with the technologies, processes, and protocols that go into getting published means that many writers and scholars from the region, but outside South Africa, are not able to get their work into the global commodity system. In fact, so crucial is this knowledge that because of the lack of it, local writers and scholars have often been hard put to get their works included even in local institutional syllabi and academic discourses. The second point that became clear to us in the course of reading the submissions to this special issue is that these problems in fact frustrate a cosmopolitan impulse that is common to both the literature and scholarship represented in this issue as well as in the desire on the part of the editors of this special issue to be associated with Research in African Literatures. The problems point to the ambiguous role played by South Africa, for centuries regarded as the regional source of a cosmopolitan outlook, in the regional search for a satisfactory conduit for entry into wider cosmopolitanism. Achille Mbembe suggests that “if ever there was an African form of metropolitan modernity, Johannesburg would be its classical location” (1). Yet the impression that emerges from the submissions we have received is that despite its metropolitan pretensions, South Africa is not a convincing source of a cosmopolitan outlook. Indeed, the whole subregion seems to be re-evaluating its long past of entanglements with South Africa, keen to stress the fact that these entanglements were a two-way process in which there was both a recognition of a regional cohesion that was not necessarily driven by South Africa’s political...

The Postcolonial Gothic: Time and Death in Southern African Literature

Summary Typically, death, violence, evil (metaphysical or actual), madness, enclosure, doubling, dangerous sexuality, incest, archaicism, ruins, haunting, monsters, bats, rats, cats, eschatological religiosity and hyperbolically tawdry dark aesthetics come to mind when the word “Gothic” is used. In other words, the Gothic immediately conjures up Eurocentric or quasi-Eurocentric imagery. This makes perfect sense when one considers that Gothic sensibilities and art are far more likely to arise, and have arisen, within cold northern climes with medieval heritages than in sunny southern ones. Nevertheless, there is a Southern Gothic, and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner produced more psychological and socially violent Gothic works than their European counterparts. My concern in this article is to explore the Southern Gothic of the USA in relation to key southern African texts in order to define what a southern African Gothic might resemble. What I discover is that the Gothic is not merely a fetishisation of the macabre and grotesque, social or aesthetic; it also involves the fantastic and sublime, often conveyed via a wry self-reflexivity in relation to time and mortality. Gothicism as a form of thanatophilia is invariably related to time and timelessness – different time scales that relativise human consciousness. I want to use the exploration and definition of the southern African Gothic to say something more generally about the Gothic in the postcolonial and the postcolonial in the Gothic. The argument that I want to make is twofold: (1) that southern African Gothicism, whilst in many ways undeveloped, conveys something of the transhistorical imagination that is vital to postcolonialism in general and (2) that alterity is approached by this Gothicism. Thus this paper attempts to restore the mythopoeic to southern African texts that were often analysed only via the materialistic and then to read that mythopoesis back into the sociohistorical and literary-critical context.

//Kabbo's Challenge: Transculturation and the Question of a South African Ecocriticism

Summary The presence of the "Bushman" in southern African literature and media is pervasive; it is arguably an ineradicable part of our regional identity. Literature derived from San or Bushman testimony provides both an opportunity and a problem for an ecologically orientated critic. This article focuses on Alan James's versions of the testimony of //Kabbo, in the Bleek-Lloyd archive, to explore the question of whether any articulations of the "Bushman" world view might provide a localised basis for a regionally-specific "ecocriticism". It suggests that both tradition and modernity will be inescapable elements of such an ecocriticism, best encompassed in a dynamic version of Ortiz's notion of transculturation.

De-silencing the Past?Challenging ?Patriotic History?: New Books on Zimbabwean Literature

Books Discussed: Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture Ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac Harare: Weaver P, 2005.ISBN 1-86888-304-3 [available through African Books Collective, Oxford, UK; for North America: Michigan State U] The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures Ed. Bettina Weiss Heidelberg: Bettina Weiss Verlag kalliope paperbacks, 2004.ISBN 3-00-014514-1 Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 2005.ISBN 3-927510-88-2. [End Page 193] African Oral Story-Telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English By Maurice Taonezvi Vambe Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 2004.ISBN 1-77922-036-7 What does literary criticism mean in times of crisis? How does literary scholarship engage with developments in a country that was once hailed as a model of political and economic progress in Africa and is now often considered to be on its deathbed? In which ways do assessments of literary works reflect the heated political discourse about the Zimbabwean nation, and in which way does it enter the contested space between nation and narration? Since 2000 the political arena in Zimbabwe has changed drastically. After the ZANU-PF government of Robert Mugabe lost the referendum for a constitutional change that was intended to enforce the position of the president, it instigated a massive and violent take-over of commercially owned farmland, blaming white farmers and the British government for the drastic economic deterioration in the country. At the same time, a broad oppositional movement spread throughout the country with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at its core, and the cities and Matabeleland at its strongholds. In the parliamentary elections of the same year, ZANU-PF used what internal and international observers described as an equally massive and violent intimidation and ensured a slight majority over the MDC. Since then Zimbabwe has been accused of systematically stifling democratic forces in the country, while the rapid downward path of the economy has led the majority of the people near starvation. After the parliamentary elections of March 2005, Operation "Murambatsvina" ("Drive Out Trash") provoked an international outcry at what appeared to many as an arbitrary onslaught on the poorest of the poor; the destruction of houses in the settlements and townships around the cities left more than 700,000 people in Zimbabwe homeless. The publication of Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture in May 2005, which coincided with this impetuous act of urban "cleansing," reflects in the most immediate way the involvement of editors and contributors with the political discourse about the narrative of the Zimbabwean nation. A compilation of mostly excellent essays by different hands, Versions reads like a monograph by a single author. The various critics' voices are driven forward and held together through a common concern—their anxiety about what is happening to the Zimbabwean nation at the present time in history. The authors take as their point of departure a "writing against blindness"—as the editors entitle their introduction—a blindness resulting from the discursive effects of what the ZANU-PF government under Robert Mugabe has termed the "Third Chimurenga" (war of liberation). Against the monolithic, authoritarian (and male) version of "patriotic" history, by which the government defines Zimbabwe's past and present, the [End Page 194] collection sheds light on the many versions and multiple voices that challenge this narrative. This critical metanarrative, implicit in all of the essays, unfolds around the core issues of violence, silence, memory, and belonging, as well as the ways writers have represented these themes. An essential part of "debating of violence" is the operation known as "Gukurahundi," the massacres of tens of thousands of people in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, an event omitted in the official historiography of the country.From this "genocide," as a number of the authors call...

BOOK REVIEW: Ed. Ernest N. Emenyonu. NEW WOMEN'S WRITING IN AFRICAN LITERATURE. African Literature 24. Oxford: James Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2004.

Reviewed by: New Women's Writing in African Literature Ezenwa-Ohaeto New Women's Writing in African Literature Ed. Ernest N. EmenyonuAfrican Literature 24. Oxford: James Currey; Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2004. 210 pp. £12.95. This is the first issue of the African Literature journal to be edited by Ernest Emenyonu. He took over from the well-respected Eldred Durosimi Jones who founded the journal about thirty-five years ago. It is therefore appropriate that this issue is dedicated to Eldred and Marjorie Jones in recognition of their labor. The journal formerly known as African Literature Today has certainly scored marks in the criticism of African literatures, especially through its policy in dedicating specific issues to themes and genres like the novel; poetry; criticism; drama; the links between Africa, America, and the Caribbean; myth and history; women in African literature; oral and written poetry; the question of Language; orature; critical theory; new trends and generations; childhood; and exile and Southern African literature. It is indeed a wide canvas that demonstrates the scope of current issues in African literatures. Emenyonu follows the precedent set by the former editor of African Literature Today no. 15 by widening the scope in this first issue he has edited, entitled New Women's Writing in African Literature. The editorial rightly stresses that "the rapid upsurge of writing by African women in the last two decades of the twentieth century was a most striking phenomenon in the development of modern African literature. It was not only apparent in the quantity and variety of output but also in the quality and craftsmanship of the writing. There have been remarkable innovative stylistic experimentations as well as thematic expansions into uncharted waters, alien domains and incursions into hitherto taboo subjects" (xi). The selection of articles in the present volume is continental in coverage and on female writers from Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire), Cameroon, Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and of course South Africa. Unfortunately, there are no articles devoted to North African women writers, which could be a result of the problems associated with translating their works into English and the impediments arising from the poor distribution of books. But Emenyonu cannot be blamed, for an editor assesses only those articles submitted and, moreover, solicited articles may fail to get to the editor due to varied reasons. Nevertheless, New Women's Writing in African Literature is rich and it provides several interesting aspects that could be interrogated, assimilated, or appreciated. [End Page 139] Interestingly, the first essay is on the female poets from Northern Nigeria, an area that is often associated with the restrictions of the purdah tradition of Muslim culture. In this essay, Aderemi Raji-Oyelede in his survey of these female poets perceives their emergence as desert flowers. He discusses the poetry of Hannatu Abdullahi, Maria Ajima, Nana Ahmed, Binta Mohammed, Cecilia Kato, and Hauwa Sambo and arrives at a predictable conclusion. He observes that the main preoccupations of the poets include a romantic concern for the environment; celebration of motherhood, sisterhood, and womanhood; an unobtrusive critique of patriarchy and religion and representations of the vagaries of love. The primacy of love in these poems is unsurprising considering the fact that most fledgling poets commence with this theme. Raji-Oyelede concludes that aesthetically "much of the literary work from this region is marked by simple poetic diction, sometimes inventive and successful, and sometimes commonplace and uninspiring" (18). There is no doubt that the apt use of imagery enhances the writing of poetry, but then the harvest of a new generation of female poets from Northern Nigeria is just beginning and there is the hope that the desert flowers will bloom, multiply, and become attractive in their variety. Two essays by Femi Osofisan and Ijeoma Nwajiaku discuss the works of Akachi Ezeigbo in comparison with Promise Okekwe (Osofisan) and in comparison with Chinwe Okechukwu (Nwajiaku). Osofisan is fascinated by the industry and prolific nature of Ezeigbo and Okekwe in producing fiction against the background of economic destabilization and political woes of their country. He uses the trilogy produced by Akachi Ezeibgo to illustrate her attempts at creating credible heroines as counterpoints...

Southern African Literatures (review)

Reviewed by: Southern African Literatures Daniel P. Kunene Southern African Literatures By Michael ChapmanPietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 2003. ISBN 1-86914-028-1 paper. 533 pp. This book contains s a 15-page preface (x–xxiv), a map of southern Africa (xxv), countries comprising the southern African region, namely, Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (xxvi–xxvii), accompanied by the languages spoken there, as well as population figures, "A note on translated works" (xxx–xxxi), and Abbreviations and Acronyms (xxxii). These are followed by a "General Introduction" (1–13). Pages 14–480 comprise the main body of the work, which is divided into parts one to six, which are titled as follows: Part One: Oral Tradition: A Usable Past (ch. 1 and 2, pp. 14–67); Part Two: Writing of European Settlement: South Africa 1652–1910 (ch. 1–4, pp. 69–144); Part Three: African or Colonial Literature: 1880 to 1960s (ch.1–4, pp. 145–259); Part Four: Commissioned by the Nation, Commissioned by the Society. Independence, Post-Independence (ch. 1–4, pp. 261–323); Part Five: Writing in the Interregnum: South Africa, 1970–1995 (ch. 1–5, pp. 325–435; Part Six: Further References (Chronology, pp. 437–80, and Individual Authors—notes on biography, works and criticism, pp. 481–515). There is also an index covering pages 516–33. Each of the first five sections, namely, parts one to five, has an introduction of its own, intended to ease the reader into the argument that follows. Except for part five, which consists of a little over four pages, the introductions average about one-and-half to one-and-three-quarter pages. A general introduction (1–13) gives what amounts to brief listings of experiences of colonization and consequent liberation movements based on "a social theory in which forms of literature are tied firmly to the event." (4). In other words, literatures are informed by the sociopolitical environments in which they are conceived and executed. This is an ambitious work that will reward many readers interested in the topic of the development of literature in southern Africa. While many researchers who undertake this enormous task find it practical and convenient to look at African literatures by blacks separately from those composed in English and Afrikaans by whites, Chapman has decided to take the plunge and see whether the impossible could be made possible and credible. This is not an easy task, if it is indeed possible. The net is cast so wide, and the catch so varied, that it is difficult to haul it on deck. First of all, Chapman views "the possibility of writing literary history in the heterogeneous societies of the southern African region"(x) as problematic. This is reinforced by the assertion that [End Page 135] [t]he study begins [. . .] from the proposition that literatures in the individual countries have tended to be defined and described according to separate linguistic-ethnic units rather than to the entity of the nation-state. In South Africa, for example, we have South African literature in English, Afrikaans literature, Zulu literature, Xhosa literature, Sotho literature, and so on, each having its hermetic sets of assumptions, myths and conventions while there is little consensus on how we might constitute a single South African literature. (xvii) The ensuing tome makes the reader realize that there are implied rhetorical "questions" embedded in the above statements, which Professor Chapman proceeds to answer in his own way by his bold attempt to "constitute a single South African literature." In coming to grips with this question, however, we have to take some historical realities into account. Among the black peoples of southern Africa, the art of writing in its current form, namely, via the roman alphabet, did not evolve naturally, but was introduced by the missionaries as an instrument for capturing the minds and souls of the people whom they were trying to convert. It came as part of a package. You could only receive it in a missionary school that used it to directly and indirectly undermine your culture, especially your religious beliefs. You came out alienated from your own people, your parents included. In your writing, you...

De-silencing the Past--Challenging &amp;quot;Patriotic History&amp;quot;: New Books on Zimbabwean Literature

Books Discussed: Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture Ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac Harare: Weaver P, 2005.ISBN 1-86888-304-3 [available through African Books Collective, Oxford, UK; for North America: Michigan State U] The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures Ed. Bettina Weiss Heidelberg: Bettina Weiss Verlag kalliope paperbacks, 2004.ISBN 3-00-014514-1 Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 2005.ISBN 3-927510-88-2. [End Page 193] African Oral Story-Telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English By Maurice Taonezvi Vambe Pretoria: U of South Africa P, 2004.ISBN 1-77922-036-7 What does literary criticism mean in times of crisis? How does literary scholarship engage with developments in a country that was once hailed as a model of political and economic progress in Africa and is now often considered to be on its deathbed? In which ways do assessments of literary works reflect the heated political discourse about the Zimbabwean nation, and in which way does it enter the contested space between nation and narration? Since 2000 the political arena in Zimbabwe has changed drastically. After the ZANU-PF government of Robert Mugabe lost the referendum for a constitutional change that was intended to enforce the position of the president, it instigated a massive and violent take-over of commercially owned farmland, blaming white farmers and the British government for the drastic economic deterioration in the country. At the same time, a broad oppositional movement spread throughout the country with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at its core, and the cities and Matabeleland at its strongholds. In the parliamentary elections of the same year, ZANU-PF used what internal and international observers described as an equally massive and violent intimidation and ensured a slight majority over the MDC. Since then Zimbabwe has been accused of systematically stifling democratic forces in the country, while the rapid downward path of the economy has led the majority of the people near starvation. After the parliamentary elections of March 2005, Operation "Murambatsvina" ("Drive Out Trash") provoked an international outcry at what appeared to many as an arbitrary onslaught on the poorest of the poor; the destruction of houses in the settlements and townships around the cities left more than 700,000 people in Zimbabwe homeless. The publication of Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture in May 2005, which coincided with this impetuous act of urban "cleansing," reflects in the most immediate way the involvement of editors and contributors with the political discourse about the narrative of the Zimbabwean nation. A compilation of mostly excellent essays by different hands, Versions reads like a monograph by a single author. The various critics' voices are driven forward and held together through a common concern—their anxiety about what is happening to the Zimbabwean nation at the present time in history. The authors take as their point of departure a "writing against blindness"—as the editors entitle their introduction—a blindness resulting from the discursive effects of what the ZANU-PF government under Robert Mugabe has termed the "Third Chimurenga" (war of liberation). Against the monolithic, authoritarian (and male) version of "patriotic" history, by which the government defines Zimbabwe's past and present, the [End Page 194] collection sheds light on the many versions and multiple voices that challenge this narrative. This critical metanarrative, implicit in all of the essays, unfolds around the core issues of violence, silence, memory, and belonging, as well as the ways writers have represented these themes. An essential part of "debating of violence" is the operation known as "Gukurahundi," the massacres of tens of thousands of people in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, an event omitted in the official historiography of the country.From this "genocide," as a number of the authors call...

‘Sincedisa – We Can Help!’ A Literature Review of Current Practice Involving Traditional African Healers in Biomedical HIV/AIDS Interventions in South Africa

This review describes research literature involved with efforts at collaboration between traditional African healers (TAHs) and biomedical practitioners in HIV/AIDS interventions in Southern Africa, The paper draws on academic texts including published and unpublished research papers, books and reports, and press comments on the subject. The focus is on Southern African literature, but selected texts from elsewhere on the continent are also included. Rather than simply reviewing selected interventions, this paper interrogates the roles assigned to traditional healers, emphasising in particular diviner-practitioners such as izangoma (sing. isangoma: Zulu; igqirha, amagqirha: Xhosa) in these interventions. The paper investigates the experience of traditional healers of these interventions, and the responses of biomedical professionals, and explores some obstacles which may hinder future collaborations. The paper concludes with some recommendations and proposals for future schemes and related research.

Teaching a Seminar in “Southern African Literature”

The author writes about her experience teaching a Master's level seminar in Southern African literature in English since 1948.

Encyclopaedia of African Literature

Simon Gikandi. Encyclopaedia of African Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. xv + 629 pp. Index. $150.00. Cloth. Early scholars of African literature still remember how welcome Hans Zell's Readers' Guide to African Literature (1972) was in this new field of criticism. Since then, African literature has become an established discipline, and need for reliable reference works on all levels is even greater. Simon Gikandi's Encyclopaedia of African Literature now provides a comprehensive source of information on literature of entire continent, ranging geographically from Mediterranean to Cape of Good Hope and linguistically from Europhone literatures to those in African languages. It is a welcome supplement to existing reference works, most of which are restricted to literature in one language or one country. With its wide scope and comprehensiveness, Gikandi's Enyclopaedia will be a useful tool for students and scholars, although African language literatures are not really covered adequately in this work. Swahili literature, for example, which boasts of continent's oldest written history, receives an entry of only three and a half columns plus occasional references in entry on East African literature. Most of Encyclopaedia consists of entries on individual authors, but there are also articles on particular themes such as oral literature, media, feminist criticism, and gender and sexuality (unfortunately without bibliography). The editor presents surveys of literary developments on a regional basis, obviously to counter general (and problematic) practice of writing literary histories of Nigeria, Ghana, and so on. In case of South African literature, however, national literature paradigm is maintained in two consecutive articles, one on literature in African languages and other on literature in English, while Afrikaans literature is listed seperately. The specific political history of South certainly justifies a treatment in terms. The separation into English, Afrikaans, and African language literatures nevertheless repeats old model of segregated critical discourse which Michael Chapman has declared obsolete and inappropriate for rainbow nation (Southern African Literature, 1995). In regard to East African literature, Gikandi treats Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian literature as one entity, but justification proposed-that three countries were joined under British rule as East African Protectorate-is misleading. Tanzania has a double German-British colonial heritage, Kenya was a settler colony where peasants in highlands were expropriated, while in Ugandan Protectorate established kingdoms of Buganda, Toro, and Bunyoro continued to play an important role under indirect rule. all these factors make for very different postindependence histories. Beyond political differences, language policies in all three countries have varied drastically: In Tanzania Swahili was adopted as national language, whereas in Uganda Luganda speakers rejected Swahili, considering it language of military and of oppression. I would also strongly disagree with editor's assertion that the significance of Amin's era in Uganda lies in creative impulses it engendered among Ungandans and non-Ugandans alike, leading to an almost unprecedented flowering of literature in East Africa (159). It is true that Amin's reign of terror provided subject matter for a number of novels, plays, and films. But it is also true that Amin not only killed intellectuals and writers but also destroyed whole cultural infrastructure, driving writers, artists, and intellectuals into exile. At end of Amin-Obote terror, flourishing literature, publishing, and theater scene of Golden Age had completely vanished, and only thing left was shallow commercial theater of domestic farce. …

The Politics of identity: South Africa, story‐telling, and literary history

Summary The publication of Michael Chapman's Southern African Literatures (1996) occasioned lively debate. In South Africa responses involved matters of identity: whose language, culture, or story would retain purchase in a new South Africa? In North America and Europe related questions were cast ‐ less emotively ‐ as enquiries into the possibility of writing literary history at a time of postmodernist “discontinuity”. Using such responses as a starting point, the paper considers the value of literary history's retention, amid discontinuity, of an ethics of narrative.

“Small Acts”: The Perspective, Location and Agency of Theory in South African Cultural Studies

In an interview with David Attwell, recorded in 1993 at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College New Hampshire, Homi Bhabha turns his liminal gaze to the fate of South Africa. His position, that of “an outsider … a bystander and consumer of the media” (Attwell 1993: 109), invokes a reading of the state of the nation and its cultural predicament which, nine years hence, remains compelling. What is particularly striking about the conversation, conducted at a geographical remove during a charged historical time when South Africa forges what will prove to be an on-going process of disinterring itself from a legacy of oppression, is Bhabha’s eschewal of a saving telos and his insistence on turning and returning to “the semiosis of the moment of transition” (1993: 104). For Bhabha this moment is not the Gramscian interregnum between two distinct states of governance. Rather, his conception subsumes the notion of two distinct states as well as Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the moment between as the emergent locus for a symptomatic morbidity. Here Bhabha diverges from the perception of those within South Africa for whom the interregnum has served as a prevailing trope, most notably Nadine Gordimer in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988: 262) and Michael Chapman in Southern African Literatures (1996: 327-331). Rather, between the renunciation of a past and the proleptic fulfilment of a future, Bhabha proffers a more enabling conception of the moment of transition; one which, having “overcome the given grounds of opposition … opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectation, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics” (Bhabha 1994: 25).

BOOK REVIEW: ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall.TEXT, THEORY, SPACE: LAND, LITERATURE AND HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICA AND AUSTRALIA. London: Routledge, 1996.

Text, Theory, Space accepts one of the main challenges of postcolonial theory--to cross national and disciplinary borders--in addressing the complex interactions among land, space, power, cultural identity, and their various representations in southern (especially South) African and Australian literature, history, and cartography. In arranging the book's sixteen essays in three sections--"Defining the South," "Claiming Lands, Creating Identities, Making Nations," and "Borders, Boundaries, Open Spaces"--the editors have created a certain chronological coherence, moving from colonial accounts of the land to postcolonial ones. While this move helps to hold the collection together, it also gives focal status to the colonial moment: in choosing Australia and South Africa, variously described as white settler colonies and white supremacist states, Text, Theory, Space seems less concerned with that other challenge of postcolonial theory--restoring voices of the formerly colonized.

BOOK REVIEW: Sue Kossew.PEN AND POWER: A POST-COLONIAL READING OF J. M. COETZEE AND ANDR� BRINK. and Richard Peck.A MORBID FASCINATION: WHITE PROSE AND POLITICS IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA.

Reviewed by: Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, and: A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Afric Dominic Head (bio) Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, by Sue Kossew. Cross/Cultures 27. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 258 pp. ISBN 90-420-007204 paper. A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa, by Richard Peck. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 197 pp. ISBN 0-313-30091-7. Sue Kossew’s book on J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, quietly published in an imprint slowly gaining recognition, is one of the more significant books yet to appear in the burgeoning field devoted to South African literature. The particular kind of complicity treated in the works of Coetzee and Brink contributes much to our understanding of the culture of the new South Africa, and also necessitates a re-evaluation of the postcolonial. [End Page 223] These are important matters, and it is to be hoped that this Rodopi paperback reaches the wide audience it deserves. The decision to structure the book as a series of comparisons between Brink and Coetzee is productive. In the monographs only Rosemary Jolly—in Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing—has considered these authors together. (Jolly’s book, as Kossew points out, appeared after Pen and Power had been completed, 3). The success of Kossew’s organization, her systematic process of comparison, is to bring into sharp relief the sensitivity of her readings. Without losing sight of the essential differences between postmodernist Coetzee and the social-realist Brink, Kossew subjects these simple categorizations to extended scrutiny, demonstrating that Coetzee is more politically engaged, and Brink more alert to the implications of language and textuality, than is sometimes assumed. The broader significance of Kossew’s study is indicated by her understanding of how Brink “writ[es] back to Afrikanerdom” (6): his decision to switch from writing in Afrikaans to English (in order to evade censorship) means he straddles two traditions, raising complex questions about white identity and affiliation. Michael Chapman has wondered whether Brink, in translating (or, rather, “re-writing”) his books into English, and reducing their emotional impact, “risks losing the temper of cultural anxiety that characterises the Afrikaner rebel seeking solidarity with the Africa that his volk has abused” (Southern African Literature 404). However, if, through this language crisis, Brink’s rebelliousness is diluted, his importance in the definition of postcoloniality (where language inscribes power) is thereby underscored. As there is no book-length survey of Brink extant, the solidity of Kossew’s readings may be seen to set a standard. Yet she fares equally well in the field of Coetzee studies, where there are several books to set against her achievements. Pen and Power, in fact, offers an informed understanding of Coetzee’s contribution to postcolonial writing, something that has not always been sufficiently acknowledged, but which is becoming clearer (as Kossew suggests) in the post-apartheid era. There is much to be applauded in the successive analyses. Kossew has properly understood, for example, the unity of Dusklands and its revisionism; the de-poeticizing impetus of In the Heart of the Country; the authenticity of Michael K’s “voice”; and the dubious authority of Susan Barton in Foe. I am wholly in agreement with these readings, for which there is certainly no critical consensus, but which are entirely faithful to the responsibility of Coetzee’s vision, and the pointedness of his “ambivalence.” Even so, there are odd moments where Kossew fails fully to excavate the positive in Coetzee. Her reading of the dream motif in Waiting for the Barbarian is a case in point: she sees the dream as simply one of many wrong turnings for the magistrate (his view), whereas it is possible to read the dream sequence as an alternative history, an accreted narrative of sublimation and advancement that belies the apparent negativity of the novel’s end. Coetzee is constantly in pursuit of such alternative narratives that might circumvent the situation of impasse faced by the post-colonizer. [End Page 224] Another minor quibble: that term, “post-colonizer,” is, perhaps, one...

Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and Andre Brink, and: A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, and: A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Afric Dominic Head (bio) Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, by Sue Kossew. Cross/Cultures 27. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 258 pp. ISBN 90-420-007204 paper. A Morbid Fascination: White Prose and Politics in Apartheid South Africa, by Richard Peck. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. 197 pp. ISBN 0-313-30091-7. Sue Kossew’s book on J. M. Coetzee and André Brink, quietly published in an imprint slowly gaining recognition, is one of the more significant books yet to appear in the burgeoning field devoted to South African literature. The particular kind of complicity treated in the works of Coetzee and Brink contributes much to our understanding of the culture of the new South Africa, and also necessitates a re-evaluation of the postcolonial. [End Page 223] These are important matters, and it is to be hoped that this Rodopi paperback reaches the wide audience it deserves. The decision to structure the book as a series of comparisons between Brink and Coetzee is productive. In the monographs only Rosemary Jolly—in Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing—has considered these authors together. (Jolly’s book, as Kossew points out, appeared after Pen and Power had been completed, 3). The success of Kossew’s organization, her systematic process of comparison, is to bring into sharp relief the sensitivity of her readings. Without losing sight of the essential differences between postmodernist Coetzee and the social-realist Brink, Kossew subjects these simple categorizations to extended scrutiny, demonstrating that Coetzee is more politically engaged, and Brink more alert to the implications of language and textuality, than is sometimes assumed. The broader significance of Kossew’s study is indicated by her understanding of how Brink “writ[es] back to Afrikanerdom” (6): his decision to switch from writing in Afrikaans to English (in order to evade censorship) means he straddles two traditions, raising complex questions about white identity and affiliation. Michael Chapman has wondered whether Brink, in translating (or, rather, “re-writing”) his books into English, and reducing their emotional impact, “risks losing the temper of cultural anxiety that characterises the Afrikaner rebel seeking solidarity with the Africa that his volk has abused” (Southern African Literature 404). However, if, through this language crisis, Brink’s rebelliousness is diluted, his importance in the definition of postcoloniality (where language inscribes power) is thereby underscored. As there is no book-length survey of Brink extant, the solidity of Kossew’s readings may be seen to set a standard. Yet she fares equally well in the field of Coetzee studies, where there are several books to set against her achievements. Pen and Power, in fact, offers an informed understanding of Coetzee’s contribution to postcolonial writing, something that has not always been sufficiently acknowledged, but which is becoming clearer (as Kossew suggests) in the post-apartheid era. There is much to be applauded in the successive analyses. Kossew has properly understood, for example, the unity of Dusklands and its revisionism; the de-poeticizing impetus of In the Heart of the Country; the authenticity of Michael K’s “voice”; and the dubious authority of Susan Barton in Foe. I am wholly in agreement with these readings, for which there is certainly no critical consensus, but which are entirely faithful to the responsibility of Coetzee’s vision, and the pointedness of his “ambivalence.” Even so, there are odd moments where Kossew fails fully to excavate the positive in Coetzee. Her reading of the dream motif in Waiting for the Barbarian is a case in point: she sees the dream as simply one of many wrong turnings for the magistrate (his view), whereas it is possible to read the dream sequence as an alternative history, an accreted narrative of sublimation and advancement that belies the apparent negativity of the novel’s end. Coetzee is constantly in pursuit of such alternative narratives that might circumvent the situation of impasse faced by the post-colonizer. [End Page 224] Another minor quibble: that term, “post-colonizer,” is, perhaps, one...

The Problem of Identity: South Africa, Storytelling, and Literary History

Commission with families and friends recollecting those who were bludgeoned to death by the forces of the racist state? A single-authored literary history, Southern African Literatures covers work from the expression of stone-age Bushmen to that of writers such as Gordimer, Brink, Breytenbach, and Coetzee. In considering the questions of what constitutes a usable past, what value may be assigned to traditional, elite, and popular forms, generally how after apartheid one might understand the linguistic and cultural complexity of the southern African region, the study inherited a literary culture that had been constructed upon of linguistic-racial exclusivities. I use the term assumptions rather than principles: although a few critics have consistently called for integrative study, the practice?a practice very short on theory?has favored surveys, anthologies, and histories delineated according to the several languages and races of the region. There are in consequence separate studies of Afrikaans litera ture, South African English literature, Zulu literature, Xhosa literature, Sotho literature, a few on white writing, and a few on black writing.2 Southern African Literatures, in contrast, presents a single though multi vocal narrative based on principles of comparison and translation. In crossing language and race barriers it asks questions such as: would Xhosa expression have developed the way it did had it not encountered a British settler presence on its ancient land? Conversely, would South