African-Language Literatures. Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi
state-appointed gatekeepers, through the Language Boards and the Department of (Black) Education, prescribed, severely hampered the development of African-language literatures. In the forty-five years of the apartheid regime, the National Party instituted a coercive hegemony that was generally detrimental to the socio-economic and political stability of the country and specifically to African-language literatures. As immediate obstacles, state censorship and self-censorship had resulted in these literatures being concerned with escapism, fantasy and mystic primitivism, noted for its ‘safe’ historical themes. The writing tended to recapitulate previously explored safe themes: the conflict of cultures, the dramatisation of the move from agrarian societies and cultures into the world of the cities and the attendant overthrow of the system of values and mores that animated the older world. And underlying these themes would be a strong, incessantly didactic, Christian moral outlook. These themes helped create a hegemonic perspective through which writers’ representations of Africans lives created and fostered common sense explanations of the disparities and inequities black South Africans experienced in their daily lives. And what perhaps is the most distinctive difference between this literature and that produced during the missionary period, is the marked decline in the quality of stylistics in terms of theme treatment (politics of representation), characterisation, plotting, realism as a mode of narration, focalisations or narrative perspectives, discursive practices and so forth (see also Mtuze, 1994).
At the dawn of the post-apartheid period, African language scholars and critics debated what should be envisioned for written literatures in African languages. Their observations regarding the matter varied greatly. A great proportion still lambasted African-language literatures for their lack of relevance, commitment or realism and their silence about burning political issues. There were also predictions that these literatures would engage with issues that affected all South Africans. Yet strident voices continued to caution against this zealousness, noting that so long as there was no significant change in the obstacles of the past (such as readership, aesthetics and publication processes) change would be difficult to attain. More significantly some critics pointed out that these literatures were still trapped in their old self-definition and that there would not be any significant changes. For this school of thought the literature was largely embroiled in colonial and apartheid mediocrity and had not yet mastered ways in which they could depict the contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa.
Chidi (1989) and Mathonsi (2002) point out that a number of these critics have also been influenced by postcolonial sensibilities. Postcolonial criticism is now an extensive field of scholarship which, in the words of Ashcroft, ‘covers all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989: 2). The field is now multi-dimensional and covers a variety of topics such as writers in the Diaspora, feminist writing, revisions of the past, the politics of historiography, and aspects of post-colonial crises. However, there have been several criticisms of post-colonial literary theory on the grounds that it is mainly theorised on the basis of Europhone literatures and hence that it overlooks many key features of African-language literatures. Barber (1995b: 3) for example, says
Post-colonial discourses block a properly historical localized understanding of any scene of colonial and post-independence literary production in Africa. Instead it selects and overemphasizes one sliver of literary and cultural production […] and this is posed as representative of a whole culture or even a whole global ‘colonial experience’.
One feature of African-language literatures that is often misrecognised by post-colonial theorists is their apparently apolitical nature. Given this assessment some critics have dismissed it as socially and politically inconsequential.
All the views discussed above demonstrate the dominant approaches operative in the study of African-language literatures. These approaches have narrow paradigms that cast African-language literature to the margins, parochially sticking to writings by the elite, as self-appointed cultural gatekeepers, to the total exclusion of the varied and often fascinating, emergent, popular forms from a wide cross-section of society.
The popular arts paradigm and generative materialism
In contrast to these stultifying approaches, the popular arts and culture paradigm is seen as useful for a systematic study not only of isiZulu or African-language literatures in general but also for black television drama. This paradigm is interdisciplinary and its intellectual genealogy includes, among others, social history, anthropology, Marxist literary criticism and Birmingham-style cultural studies and literary theory (Haynes, 2000). Significant aspects of this model were developed by Barber in her study of Yoruba travelling theatre which, in composition, drew from a variety of everyday sources. In her work on Yoruba theatrical performances, Barber has formulated a series of analytical approaches that are useful for the study of African-language literatures and television dramas as popular arts (Barber, 2000). Barber’s generative materialism, premised on a sociologically inclined approach to the arts, explores the economic, social and cultural levels of text production. Barber has since developed this approach to create a set of literary tools to explain African everyday culture, focusing on the inner pulse, or what she calls the ‘meristematic tip’, responsible for the continual evolution of African popular culture. Speaking of Yoruba popular theatre, she describes it as a living, contemporary, collectively improvised and continually emergent form (Barber: 7). The observations she makes for Yoruba travelling theatre are also applicable to African-language literatures and black television dramas. Modern African-language literatures likewise evince that internal dynamism that readily predispose them to commentary on topical, contemporary occurrences and happenings, drawing from the lived experiences of ordinary people in familiar localities and using appropriate linguistic resources.
Also significant in Barber’s model is her analysis of artistic products that, whilst drawing from popular culture, are able to edify their readers through the demonstration of moral messages flavoured by, and constructed within, local interpretation. The fact that local, cultural producers share the same world as their target audience indicates the close affinity that exists between the producer, the audience and the text. This interrelationship helps produce vibrancy in the production and interpretation of the texts. Thus Barber emphasises that ‘in Western Africa, then, people continually produce new forms in order to come to grips with the massive transformation of modernity’(ibid: 5). Although international and transnational media images appeared to be at the forefront of social transformation in the Yoruba context, Barber notes
that people’s overwhelming preoccupation was with social transformations that were perceived as locally rooted and were actually experienced on the ground […] It was these locally experienced transformations that set the terms in which images of other lives, other cultures were appropriated – in different ways at different historical moments. And it was these transformations which remained the mesmerizing focus of popular commentary, and which all the new popular genres of the twentieth century – the Yoruba novel, drama, neo- traditional poetry, visual art, popular music – were created to grapple with. In Western Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa and beyond, it was vernacular genres, representing local experiences that held people’s attention (2000: 133).
As I discuss later in the book, this latter aspect of Barber’s observation is conspicuous in South African black television series. Similar expressive modalities and extensive overlaps between black television dramas and African-language literatures in this case seem to be rooted in the regeneration and recycling of past themes, plot structures, lessons and styles of characterisation in a manner that Barber’s concept of generative materialism demonstrates in her study of Yoruba theatre. She points out that
real experience is narrativized and circulates in the form of anecdotes while existing stories become the templates by which real experience is apprehended […] In this cycle, written texts may participate on the same footing as the anecdotes of experience. Many plays seem to have been an amalgam of hearsay, anecdote, folktale, and written fiction (2000: 9).
In spite of this Barber points out that with Yoruba theatre there is an inherent quest for innovation, exploring the unknown through representations that go beyond the permutation of known elements (ibid: 9). This characteristic of forging forward towards the unknown constitutes the growing point bringing