African-Language Literatures. Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi
of the field
African-language literatures cover a wide range of black South African literatures in different languages; Khoi and San languages and literatures (which have been precluded and remain excluded in formal studies of African-language literatures), isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, SiSwati, Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, Xitsonga and Tshivenda. Each of these language categories has its own, but not necessarily distinct, language-bound literary system: a structure which follows the apartheid policy of separate development. The paralysing effect of this arrangement is that African-language literatures remain incapable of realising themselves as, or of achieving a status of, pan-ethnic or national literature. These literatures have been overtaken in this regard by various popular art forms such as music, theatre, film and television which were initially conceptualised within a discourse of control under apartheid but have since outstripped these constricting boundaries to articulate an inclusively popular African culture. Yet, in profound ways, these African-language literatures represent the truest and most uninterrupted forms of black expressive art in South Africa. The processes developed for the production of these literatures from their conceptualisation, writing, the feedback systems authors established and the discourse drawn on are wholly and unabashedly African. This contrasts with the production of theatre, music and television where there is often collaboration between different races, with the problems attendant on that, as well as those caused by the politics of production. In the production of African-language literatures only the publishing sector represents interests outside African cultural interests. However, this sector still remains the major contributor to the low status and negative perceptions suffered by this literary tradition (Evans and Seeber, 2000).
This brief description of the broad spectrum covered by the African-language literatures field indicates that, within the confines of this book, it is impractical for an in-depth analysis of art forms comprising all the different language literatures embraced by this term. Therefore this book will concentrate mainly on isiZulu-language literature and black television dramas as microcosmic reflections of the imperatives encapsulated in the popular discourse of Africans, despite ethnic and linguistic differences. These art forms further provide a fascinating terrain in which extra-textuality, dynamism, multivocality and the interaction of genres operating within particular contexts can be examined.
The isiZulu language as medium of communication between various ethnicities adequately reflects the multi-layered concerns and issues prevailing in the popular imagination compared to other South African indigenous languages. Out of the 50 million legal and illegal citizens comprising the South African population, indigenous South African languages are spoken by almost 77 per cent of the population. The other 23 per cent comprise speakers of English, Afrikaans, a number of minor languages such as modern European, Indian and a host of other foreign African languages that have come to add to the linguistic mix of South Africa’s post-apartheid society (Kamwangamalu, 2004). The isiZulu language is spoken by approximately 15 million people in its heartland which is KwaZulu-Natal. It also dominates the linguistic terrain of Africans in the Gauteng province, South Africa’s economic hub, and it is spoken fairly widely in other major provinces such as Mpumalanga, the Eastern Cape and in some parts of the Free State, especially in areas bordering Zululand (Pansalb, 2000). As most black South Africans are bilingual or multilingual, isiZulu is one of the languages often spoken by them. The dominance of this language is attributed to a number of social variables that characterised the pre-colonial, colonial and the apartheid periods. The isiZulu language is also part of the Nguni family and therefore has mutual intelligibility with isiXhosa, isiNdebele and SiSwati. Furthermore, intermarriages between differing ethnicities, migrant labour, and the historical displacement of Zulu people through the Mfecane wars in pre-colonial times spread this language variety across a wide terrain. Its varieties, namely Zimbabwean Ndebele and Ngoni, are spoken respectively in Zimbabwe and in some parts of Malawi.
Earlier literary approaches
The study of indigenous language writing, ever since its emergence in the nineteenth century, has been premised on Western bourgeois ideals of what literature is, and particularly on the English literary tradition. During colonial times, when it gradually dawned on missionaries that they should preserve African culture, they, together with anthropologists and philanthropists, collected and edited folklore materials such as songs, poetry, folktales, proverbs and riddles and cultural practices and recorded the history that pertained to each society they worked in. These texts formed the bulk of the first materials collected about African oral literature and the traditional world. The works of Berglund (1889), Callaway (1913) and Bryant (1929) give a glimpse into the nature of the oral world, the world that was to be lamented or lambasted in the writing of the missionary educated Africans. Jabavu (1921), one of the first missionary educated Africans, set the scene for the survey of literature in isiXhosa. His approach gave an overview of what had been accomplished and this became the organising pattern for other surveys conducted for the literatures of different languages. In isiZulu literature, Vilakazi (1945), Scheub (1985), Nyembezi (1961) and Gérard (1971 and 1981) also trace literary production from the earliest publications in 1865 to the point at which they write. These literary surveys are divided into the four subsections of novels, short stories, drama, and poetry. In each subsection a short synopsis of each title and the year of its publication are given. The entries are chronological. Maake (1992) replicated this approach for Sesotho, Serudu (1996) for Sepedi, and Zulu (2000) has provided the most recently updated version for isiZulu literature. The major problem with this form of criticism is that there is not much critical analysis of the texts (Maake, 2000; Kunene, 1989). Also, the survey approach does not look at the different languages’ literatures as a collective indigenous discourse but stresses their separateness, playing to the Afrikaner nationalist philosophy of separate development. Another problem is that, although additional background on the titles that were published is also provided, there is a lack of information on the intellectual contexts of the writers and the politics of publishing that influenced a number of the options the writers decided upon.
Valuable critiques of missionary sponsored literature emerge much later in the last century, and collectively give an overall view of both the missionary and apartheid literary production in isiZulu (Swanepoel, 1996). This scholarship provides a critique of the hegemonic worldviews presented in the texts which usually comprised an exploration of a Western lifestyle and an African traditional lifestyle and how the latter would either be imposed upon by, or undermined in favour of, the Western lifestyle. One criticism concerns the lack of any depiction of the socio-political and economic realities of the African population or their inadequate treatment in the texts. Better accounts would have exposed the sources of inequities. Yet another criticism of isiZulu literature involved the question of stylistics; the emulation and the employment of Western literary techniques and conventions which had not been adequately mastered.
The critical materials published during the apartheid period by and large continued the earlier established trend of literary surveys. In addition to the surveys, there emerged a corpus of materials that began interrogating the content of fiction, poetry and drama. Modified structural theories like Russian Formalism and Structuralism coupled with New Criticism, not only became the organising structures for literary criticism but also became the operational mode for creative composition. Numerous African language practitioners and scholars prepared oversimplified, translated versions of these theories for the school market and teacher training colleges or for budding or future writers to use as models.1 The modified versions of Structuralism and New Criticism eventually became the basic approach to the study of African-language written literatures and have come to form a hegemonic bloc that completely excludes other approaches to indigenous-language fiction. The current syllabus of African-language literatures instruction at schools, training colleges and some universities continues to reflect this trend. No critical analysis2 of the texts is sought from the students and the authority of the texts is never questioned. The aims and objectives of studying literature do not give students an opportunity to develop a critical approach to texts.
The entrenchment of the Afrikaner Nationalist philosophy in every sphere of life of the South African political economy further complicated the politics of African-language writing (Mpe and Seeber, 2000; Maake, 2000). During the reign of apartheid, there was a sharp increase in the production of African-languages texts and literatures,