Black Literature in South Africa 1900-1950
Date
1974-10
Authors
Couzens, T.
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Abstract
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.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 1974. Not to be used without the Author's permission
Keywords
African literature, Politics in literature, South African literature (English). Black authors