Читать книгу African-Language Literatures - Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi - Страница 8

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, but the kind of literature that the 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.