Black Literature in South Africa 1900-1950
| dc.contributor.author | Couzens, T. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2010-09-03T11:26:47Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2010-09-03T11:26:47Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1974-10 | |
| dc.description | African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented October, 1974. Not to be used without the Author's permission | en_US |
| dc.description.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. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10539/8605 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | African Studies Institute;ISS 102 | |
| dc.subject | African literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | Politics in literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | South African literature (English). Black authors | en_US |
| dc.title | Black Literature in South Africa 1900-1950 | en_US |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en_US |