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  • A History of South African Literature
  • Laura Wright
Christopher Heywood . A History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 296 pp. Chronology. Map. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth.

Christopher Heywood's A History of South African Literature feels, at least initially, like a comprehensive study of South African social and political evolution as depicted in the poetry, drama, and fiction produced by writers of South Africa's diverse language and ethnic groups from precolonial times to the present. The text is broken into two parts in which Heywood attempts to characterize literature written before the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and then to explore the literary transformations that took place afterward. But in his introduction, Heywood makes two contradictory claims that underlie his subsequent analyses and serve to effectively undermine the impact of his study: first, that South Africa can be divided into four communities (the "Khoisan, Nguni-Sotho, Anglo-Afrikaner, and Indian"), and second, that his book examines the merging of these communities "through bodily and literary creolisation from pre-colonial to present times"(vii) as they form one nation.

Heywood's claims would seem to point to a kind of emergent societal holism. They are supported by the author's attempts throughout the text to construct South Africa as a singular nation, community, and people. He states that by treating the apartheid categorizations of "English, Afrikaans, Coloured, and black" as a "single subject," he has created a book that "overflies the colonial past" (vii). For all of his admirable efforts to present a unified South African consciousness, however, he conflates culturally constructed identities, providing the reader with an inconclusive and uneven examination of South African literature and history, beginning with the categories that he establishes in the introduction. The term "Khoisan," for [End Page 202] instance, is a misnomer first used by Isaac Schapera in The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (1930) that conflates two distinct peoples, the Khoi and the San. Heywood's conflation of the Anglo-African and Dutch Afrikaner populations as "Anglo-Afrikaner" is similarly problematic, given the contentious and violent history that has shaped the relationship between South Africa's primary white groups.

Heywood does provide an impressive cataloging of South African literature, ranging from W. H. I. Bleek's collection of oral texts, Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864), to the fiction of contemporary writers like Barbara Trapido and Ivan Vladislavic. However, the "melting-pot" argument at the core of the study, an argument based on creolization through "genocide" and "lovemaking" (1), is seriously flawed. He offers some impressive analyses of this theme, particularly when he reads biological racial mixing as "Hamite" in Sarah Gertrude Millin's 1926 novel God's Stepchildren, as a form of protest against racial classification in Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night (1965), and ultimately as a symbol of social self-recognition in Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002). Such readings are cogent enough when examined in the context of three specific works, but in trying to read the entirety of South African culture through such a lens, Heywood omits, downplays, or outright criticizes literary achievements that do not fit his emergent utopian model of cultural unification.

For example, some texts receive lengthy summations and analyses, while others are mentioned in a few paragraphs that read more like reviews than critical scholarship. Writers such as the poet Guy Butler and the novelist Zakes Mda seem to be favorites, as is the novelist Daphne Rooke, whose A Grove of Fever Trees (1946) is characterized by Heywood as a "remarkable pre-Sharpeville achievement" (134). Such writers' works seem to further Heywood's argument, as do the texts of Pamela Jooste, James Matthews, and Zoë Wicomb which, according to Heywood, focus on "sympathetic community reconstruction" (218). J. M. Coetzee, the 2003 Nobel Prize–winning novelist, on the other hand, is chastised in an egregious misreading, for producing work that is, according to Heywood, "marred by [Coetzee's] tendency to write about worlds of which he had little direct experience, notably the rural and semi-desert Afrikaner farming world that appears in his novel In the Heart of the Country" (220...

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