Heywood's is a dynamic, organic approach

Annie Gagiano

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Title: A History of South African Literature Author: Christopher Heywood Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521554853 Publishing Date: 2005 Pages: 310 Format: Hardcover

Dear Editor

This piece is an introduction to, rather than a review of, the above text. It is an abbreviated and slightly adapted version of a speech made on the occasion of the celebration of the launch of the text on February 1st this year.

Heywood's book and its author share a number of qualities that might be catalogued as follows: both are handsome; distinguished; eloquent; occasionally idiosyncratic or even exasperating; fascinating; provocative; unpredictable; committed to South Africa and its literature; insightful; informative; serious in intention but enthusiastic in manner; succinct; intellectually risk-taking; a little bit anarchic; non-judgemental and generous.

The design of the book, which lists and discusses texts in all the major linguistic cultures of South Africa according to a two-part (pre- and post-Sharpeville) historical design, and which sorts them according to genre rather than by means of the old race and language classifications, signals its author's determination to convey the sense of an inclusive, shared South African history.

Its basic principle might be termed (to coin a word) relationalism.

Three basic values inform the work as a whole: firstly, a recognition of orality as the basis of literary art; secondly, an appreciative attitude towards creolisation (which might be loosely defined as the mutual and differentially proportioned influences exerted and registered by all cultures on and from those around them), which sees it as both an actual and an enriching condition of the various language-literatures of the country; and thirdly, an emphasis on literature as a "writing back to", rather than a mere passive recording of, historical events and processes.

Heywood refers to South Africa as a "cohesive creole" society (4) because, remarkably, its bitterly divisive history has never yet allowed any of its linguistic communities to ignore the others, whether oppressing or oppressed by them.

The words of the San visionary Kabbo, who instructed and was recorded by William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (in the 1800s in Cape Town), are a fitting and carefully chosen introduction to this historically focused account of South African literature. Although the quoted words (31) show Kabbo mourning for his absent people (he was sentenced to convict labour for sheep-stealing from colonial farmers) and indicate something of the bitter history of agricultural colonisation, the saying that "a story is [like] the wind" also recognises the ability of the various local narratives to reach and reach out to "other" South Africans.

This brief piece cannot list the rich array of poets and poetry, works of fiction and their authors, or plays and playwrights that Heywood places in relation to one another in this book and can only note that the text supplies contextualising comments that place the cited works within local, sometimes continental and occasionally world historical contexts. Heywood's is a dynamic, organic approach. His literary history pays tribute to an enormous variety of authors and works while displaying a healthy African confidence and a belief in the vitality of the various South African cultures and also acknowledging the social and political horrors, failures and shame to which the people of this country have subjected one another, or by which they have been subjugated. The book is a salutary attempt to overcome and end the separation and ghettoisation of the different strands of local culture; it points the way forward to a time when many more writers and readers will hopefully have larger loyalties than have appeared in some notoriously hostile recent Afrikaans reviews of Heywood's text.

Annie Gagiano



LitNet: 17 February 2005

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