A complex history
South African literature did not really begin to be written until the beginning of the 20th century, but the country's history was already marked by two waves of colonization. The Dutch established themselves in 1652 with the creation of a trading post by the Dutch East India Company. As for the English, they arrived at the very end of the 18th century. The rivalries that opposed them and those they cultivated with the indigenous peoples, as well as the discovery of mineral wealth that fanned the flames of envy, gave rise to many conflicts that culminated in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the concentration camps where the descendants of the Dutch, who were henceforth known as the Afrikaners, were parked. Although the disagreement was deep, a relative independence from the British Crown was obtained when the South Africa Act was signed in 1910. However, if the whites agree, the voice of the blacks does not carry. In 1912, they united in a political party, the ANC (African National Congress). The following year, the Native Land Act granted them barely a quarter of the territory, as a harbinger of the terrible inequalities entrenched by the segregation laws that would continue to harden during the apartheid ("segregation" in Afrikaans) adopted in 1948. Olive Schreiner, who was born in 1855 and died at the age of 65, was the author of a book that is still being published with passion by Libretto, La Nuit africaine. Daughter of a bitter German missionary, it was in England, where she had found refuge, that she finally succeeded in publishing this novel in 1883, even if it meant accepting a male pseudonym, Ralph Iron. The work, which already evoked the near-impossibility of living together and contained much autobiographical material, was an immediate success. Back in Cape Town in 1889, she became involved in politics, demanding equal human rights, regardless of gender or ethnic origin.
While the Afrikaners created a literary society, the Afrikaanse Taalvereniging, in 1907, their pens were loosened with regard to the sufferings endured during the Second Boer War. Jan Celliers (1855-1940) evoked them in 1908 in a long poem, Die Vlakte en ander gedigte. His acolytes, Eugène Marais (1871-1936) and Louis Leipoldt (1880-1947), followed in his footsteps, helping to write the legend of the pioneer spirit, but also the attachment to religion and to the peasant spirit that was to be found in the DNA of the so-called Romanesque Plaas
movement. Their contemporary, Solomon Plaatje, born in 1876 in the Orange Free State, also experienced the war intimately. The new century saw him become involved in politics, within the SANNC, the precursor of the ANC, as well as in literature. At first a collector of Tswana proverbs, an idiom he tried to preserve, he nevertheless chose English to write his most famous work, Mhudi, An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago, the first novel written by a black man in South Africa and now unfortunately out of print in French with Actes Sud despite a brilliant translation by Jean Sévry. Having opted for the language of the settler in order to get his message across to as many people as possible, Plaatje wants to put the native peoples back into the heart of the history of a country that has an increasing tendency to leave them on the sidelines or to retain only the major episodes that have marked the fate of the whites. To this end, his fiction is an epic with a touch of optimism. Mhudi was published in 1930 after being extensively revised. A few years later, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi began publishing in Zulu after having worked for the newspaper Ilanga lase, which had been co-founded in 1903 by John Langalibalele Dube. Vilakazi's writings, his poetry as well as his novels, Nje nempela or Noma nini, have continued to influence his peers. A posthumous tribute was awarded to him in 2016 by the Order of Ikhamanga.Apartheid
In 1948, Alan Stewart Plato, a descendant of English settlers, published Cry, The Beloved Country , and, through the eyes of his hero, Stephen Koumalo, a black pastor, he describes the rampant segregation that had taken place in the previous years, the success of the re-enactment of the Great Trek ten years earlier was proof of this.
That fateful year, 1948, made the division official with a whole armada of laws that became increasingly oppressive and that very quickly dictated the essential aspects of the daily life of blacks (1948: ban on mixed marriages, 1952: compulsory passes, 1953: ban on the right to strike, etc.). In reaction, letters became a tool of testimony, as in the case of Drum
magazine, founded in 1951 and very vigorously redesigned by a former Royal Air Force pilot, Jim Bailey. Although the militant aspect of the periodical was perhaps diminished by the personal interests of its editor, the magazine nevertheless had the ingenious idea of opening its columns to black writers who would explore reality from the inside through reports or photographs. Some of them - William "Bloke" Modisane, Daniel "Can" Themba, Nat Nakasa - would use journalistic writing as a springboard for more personal, even fictional, pieces.Some also ended up making the difficult choice of exile, like Lewis Nkosi, whose third novel, written when he returned to South Africa, which he had to flee for forty years because of censorship, is available under the title Mandela and Me from Actes Sud. But it is not only black people who are victims of government oppression. Nadine Gordimer's book Un monde d'étrangers was banned when it was published in 1958. Born into a middle-class family in Springs in 1923, the daughter of an Englishwoman and a Lithuanian man, Gordimer was sensitive to the issue of discrimination from an early age, a prelude to her later commitment to the ANC, to which she remained loyal despite Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962 and the pressure she was subjected to. In a purely realistic vein, the author also shows loyalty to her country, which she examines in its worst aspects, while describing it with love. Her prolific work, which can be discovered, for example, by reading The Curator (published by Grasset, Booker Prize 1974) or Burger's Daughter
(published by Points), earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.On the Afrikaner side, the 1960s also witnessed a certain amount of questioning, which was reflected in the letters of the Sestigers, intellectuals who had had the opportunity to travel, and therefore to compare, and who would become influential writers. The first of these was certainly André Brink (1935-2015), who studied literature at the Sorbonne. From his Parisian sojourns, he brought back an enlightened vision of the possible links between peoples, which he did not hesitate to express in his novels, as witnessed by A Dry White Season, which tells how a white man risks losing everything to elucidate the death of a black man to whom he was close. This book was awarded the Prix Médicis in 1980, and was the first Afrikaner novel to be banned by the government... Breyten Breytenbach was also forced to take refuge in Paris when he married a French woman of Vietnamese origin, which violated the law prohibiting mixed marriages and prevented him from returning to his native country. He circumvented this prerogative illegally and was sentenced to a long prison term. He will put his exile into poetry in La Femme dans le soleil (Woman in the Sun
), available from the precious Bruno Doucey publishing house. In their wake, other authors are associated with the Sestigers - Elsa Joubert, Anna Louw, Étienne Leroux, Reza de Wet, etc. In contrast, J. M. Coetzee, who was born in Cape Town in 1940 but later applied for Australian citizenship, has always refused to allow his books - whose historical and geographical roots are often left unclear - to be seen as the sole denunciation of apartheid. Not that politics is absent, but the universality of human struggles is valued, a taste for "transvestism" that the Nobel Prize jury underlined when it awarded him the prize in 2003. His very personal writing can be discovered in translation by Points, with titles such as Michael K, his life, his time and Disgrace, both of which - notably - won him a Booker Prize.New pages to write
The term "kwaito" refers primarily to a musical movement that emerged at the time of the end of apartheid, but it has also been translated into literature by Sello Duiker (born in Soweto in 1974, committed suicide in 2005) and Phaswane Mpe (born in 1970, died of AIDS in 2004). Both had created a poetry circle, Seeds, and had evoked in their novels ( Thirteen Cents and Welcome to our Hillbrow respectively) the poverty, prostitution and xenophobia that continued to plague the lives of South Africans during the transition period. To say that the page has been turned and that writers can move on to other horizons, perhaps in the way that Njabulo Ndebele, who in the 1970s was wary of the limits of reportage literature and who twenty years later urged a "rediscovery of the ordinary", wished to do, it seems presumptuous when one realizes that even today authors who have acquired a certain renown abroad, such as Marlene Van Niekerk(Agaat, published by Gallimard) or the very famous Deon Meyer, who excels in the crime fiction genre, are still continually rubbing shoulders with the history of their country. It is hard to believe that playwright Damon Galgut is reproached for not mentioning apartheid, but it is always possible to ask the question, as the young Imraan Coovadia does in Flux et Reflux (Zoé) when he describes the difficulty of turning the page and - again - the difficulty of communicating between the different communities of a nation that dreamed of itself as rainbow.
