A History of South African Literature (review)

This is an extraordinary book for a distinguished scholarly press to have produced. It has already been greeted with snorts of derision from critics, scholars and writers in South Africa, and I would recommend it to neither students nor newcomers to the field. Yet it has its strengths, those of an eccentric and rather wayward approach to its subject. The author has clearly read and consulted widely, has taught in the area for many years, and he writes with verve and occasional insight. But his faults are many, and egregious; not the least of which is the pretence that his book is the first of its kind.

As long ago as 1925, Manfred Nathan’s South African Literature (Cape Town: Juta) offered a chronological survey, taking in travel, history and biography as well as the usual literary genres, while assuming that it was all in either English or Dutch (mainly the former), and ignoring black or indigenous cultural production. Stephen Gray’s Southern African Literature (Cape Town: David Philip, 1979) included a wider geography and noted the ‘emergence’ of black writing in English, while excluding all those – and they were many – expelled by the apartheid regime. The first truly magisterial study (a phrase misapplied to Heywood’s book by the blurb) was Michael Chapman’s Southern African Literatures (London: Longman, 1996), which brought together a vast range of material, organised in terms of a progressive, historicist approach which, if inevitably reductive, left his account the best of its kind.

Chapman’s book is ignored by Heywood, as are his other predecessors; nor does he refer to the important collection of essays on Rethinking South African Literary History (eds J.A. Smit, J.van Wyk, and J.P. Wade, Durban: Y Press, 1996), which offered challenging questions about how to construct such a history in the post-apartheid context. Indeed, Heywood fails to offer any coherent rationale for his approach which, although apparently open to the multiplicity of languages, cultures and traditions that make up the country’s literary inheritance, is based on an arbitrary and distorting version of that inheritance. The country is, Heywood argues in his Preface, “creolised,” the result of a “merging” of “four interwoven communities – Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Anglo-Afrikaner, and Indian,” each of which has its own oral and literary tradition. These labels tendentiously associate historically, culturally and ethnically diverse groups such as the Xhosa and Zulu while ignoring others, such as the Venda, a difficulty which is not overcome by such subsequent manoeuvres as silently incorporating the Khoisan into “Coloured,” itself a multiple identity; nor by admitting the profound antagonisms between, and complexities within, the English-language and Afrikaans traditions. (Indian writing gets barely a mention.)

This is not to suggest that it is wrong to propose an intercultural or comparativist approach, or to try and resist the ethno-linguistic ghettos that have featured in South African literary production for so long. But there is a need for accuracy and consistency (the book abounds in errors), as well as due regard for the local, historically determined, yet shifting identities of literary producers and their communities. The deficits in this respect are enormous: one example from many is provided by the lack of mention, much less cursory discussion, of the “Sestigers”: an influential renegade Afrikaner group of the 1960s, including André Brink, Jan Rabie, Etienne Leroux, Breyten Breytenbach and several others, all consciously influenced by European authors such as Beckett and Camus, and all of whom went on to produce strikingly varied and influential work.

One might have thought, given Heywood’s enthusiasm for associating his chosen writers with European or ‘world’ authors, that he would have attended to the Sestigers. But Heywood’s enthusiasm for world authors - damning enough for a South African readership that considers it has been too long in the grip of “Eurocentricism” – is only intermittently helpful. The names of D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Christopher Fry and (bizarrely) Flaubert and Goethe feature as points of comparison, when more local influences would have been appropriate...