Opening Southern African Studies Post-Apartheid

Books Discussed:

New Writing from Southern Africa, by Emmanuel Ngara, comp. and ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; London: James Currey; Nairobi: East African Educational P; Cape Town: David Philip; Harare: Baobab, 1996. xii + 172 pp. ISBN 0-435-08971-4 paper.

Rethinking South African Literary History, by Johannes A. Smit, Johan van Wyk, and Jean-Philippe Wade, eds. Durban: Y Press, 1996. 250 pp. ISBN 1-875094-05-9 paper.

Southern African Literatures,by Michael Chapman. London: Longman, 1996. xxxi + 533 pp. ISBN 0-582-0537-2 paper.

With the capitulation of the apartheid government in the Republic of South Africa in February 1990, inevitably for the Southern African region as a whole would begin a new process of stocktaking in the subcontinent's literature. Here are three fresh works that embark in various ways on this challenging enterprise of redefining the past, finding a reformulated future. The drag on the region's progress has been removed, leaving much damage; now we must recover, move forward.

The first of these works is the least successful in assessing this new territory, although the title of Emmanuel Ngara's collection is quite explicit: new writing from Southern Africa. Correctly speaking, apart from South Africa itself, this includes what used to be called the front-line states of the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference: its neighboring territories of Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho; its "fifth province" for most of the century, now independent Namibia; the inland block of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi (in all of which English is a major language); together with the flanking Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola and Mozambique.

Ngara hardly tries to be representative: 87 of his pages are devoted to the giant, now-free South Africa where he currently lives and teaches; 59 to his home-country of Zimbabwe—which, indeed, since its independence in 1980 has developed a convincing literary output; and 15 pages to vital and accomplished Malawi, also recently democratic. Namibia is referred to only twice; none of the other countries qualifies for a mention. One would have thought the greatest contemporary practitioners of "new writing" in Southern Africa, José Craveirinha, Pepetela and Mia Couto, would have become tangled into the footnotes at least, but apparently their language has ruled them out. Admittedly Ngara's subtitle is "Authors Who Have Become Prominent since 1980," but even Bessie Head (d. 1986), who really put Botswana on the map, is omitted.

Further statistics illustrate Ngara's short-circuiting. Of the ten scholars represented here, only two are women (despite the fact that throughout the field, women literary critics have usually been prominent). Of the eleven authors who receive major attention, only one is—Tsitsi Dangarembga (despite the fact that women have never not been prominent literary producers). Why, regarding literature in the new Zimbabwe, are Chenjerai Hove and Shimmer Chinodya given whole chapters, while Yvonne Vera achieves only one passing reference? Why does Steve Chimombo get the entire Malawian allocation, while poor Jack Mapanje is only referred to once (as the coeditor of a volume, and that in another context), and Legson Kayira and Tiyambe Zeleza are ignored?

The South Africa pages are given to blacks-only, the exception being those allotted to two has-been white Afrikaners who, although they may only recently have become known to outsiders, are locally described as Sestigers, or writers of the '60s. Evidently Breyten Breytenbach and André Brink may by some be believed to have deserted their Afrikaans language and thus come to qualify as English-speakers. Their dissidence has made them young!

To put the matter of South African representativeness in some perspective: recently I edited a showcase volume of "new work" of the rainbow nation, The Penguin Book of Contemporary South African Short Stories. The criteria for inclusion were that each author have a fair amount of work already published in reviews and in book-form, and that he/she should be felt to have already made a particular contribution to...