African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers
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Item ‘A thing of unspeakable horror’ - The history of the loo in literature and life(1987?) Couzens, T.The title of this book requires explanation. Some years ago I saw a Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine. It was of one of his crazed-looking, loony characters standing in a laboratory with a test-tube filled with smoking liquid in his hand. He says: *One drink of this and I shall turn into a thing of unspeakable horror*. He drinks ... and nothing happens. So he throws the failed experimental liquid into a nearby sink. Instantly it turns into ••• a loo! As we shall see the cartoon is manifestly slanderous. I must also own up to a personal interest in the subject. My father was a plumber; my grandfather was a plumber. I hail from a plumbing line. But I was the stupid one of the family - I became an academic. I have never quite managed to become part of the Brain Drain. Instead I must content myself with being, at least today, the Drain Brain. I am, however, no Specialist, and this book should not be taken as the last word on the subject. The writing of loo history is an ancient and honorable profession and I must thank some of the pioneers in the field whose work I have drawn upon.Item A short history of "The World" (and other Black South African newspapers)(1976-06) Couzens, T.This paper developed out of my interest in black literature. It soon became apparent that an understanding of early black written literature was dependent on a knowledge of the history of the black press. It also soon became apparent that the history of the black newspapers is a grossly neglected field: and it is furthermore a very complex one which I doubt I can do full justice to. My aim will be to give an outline idea of some of the problems and crucial events and to make familiar some of the names of the prominent block journalists of the past. (Thereafter, I shall briefly outline the implications for early black literature.)Item History of the Black Press in South Africa 1836-1960(1984-09) Couzens, T.Item The Ghostly dance: Writing in a new South Africa, published by IDASA(1990) Couzens, T.Since the subject of "Literary Criticism in South Africa" is a vast one, I am going to narrow the topic to the idea of research in South African literature and I do not aim to be comprehensive in any way. Looking back over the last 20 years I am saddened by what we have missed, the opportunities lost. I shall dwell on the past in the hopes that it will teach us something about the present and future. I shall deal with six aspects of what I regret.Item Black Literature in South Africa 1900-1950(1974-10) Couzens, T.The magazine Drum began in March, 1951, and it has become deservedly famous since: partly for the ethos it created, partly for the writers that it fostered - writers such as Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, Ezekiel Mphahlele et. al. But the image some critics create, and the image which seems to inhere in the popular mind (whatever that may be) is that black writing in South Africa up till 1951 consisted only of the odd and isolated literary event.... In this paper I have three main aims: 1. To show the continuous tradition of writing in English by blacks between 1900 and the 1950's (even this is artificially to exclude the large amount of vernacular writing during this period. It is an artificial exclusion but to include vernacular writing, I believe, could only strengthen the argument of this paper). To show the links, almost inseparable connections, between literature, journalism and politics - all three areas being aspects of the continuous "secondary resistance." Partly my aim here is to indicate that there are no sudden "peaks" or outcrops of literature, that the imaginative works arise naturally out of a continuous debate which has frequent simultaneous expression in other media. The "uniqueness" of literary works must therefore be seen in the light of the fact that their central issues are being discussed contemporaneously in other media. In other words these works are not so "unique", not peculiar phenomena or outcrops: literary productions between 1900 and 1950 are not so isolated. The history of black writing in the Nineteenth Century is largely outside the scope of this paper: Professor Albert S Gerard's book Four African Literatures (University of California Press, 1971) gives a detailed account of this period. Suffice it to say that black journalism began in Southern Africa in July, 1837, and was later to make famous the names of Tujo Soga and John Tengo Jabavu. So that by 1900 there was a fairly strong tradition of journalism. The years 1928 to 1930 saw the publication of three of the more well-known works of the period under consideration. These were Sol Plaatje's novel Mhudi, John Dube's Zulu novel Insila kg Shako (translated into English in 1951) and R.R.R. Dhlomo's An African Tragedy. The lives of the first two of these writers form a kind of model for the rest of the paper.