WRITING IN ENGLISH
1One needs to acknowledge that there are important continuities (as well as striking differences) between the writers associated with Drum and the writers of the 1930s, whose most obvious representatives are H.I.E. and R.R.R. Dhlomo.2 These earlier writers were invariably mission-educated, worked as journalists or newspaper editors, and usually played an active role in the public sphere. Their most remarkable predecessor was undoubtedly Sol Plaatje, newspaper editor, linguist and translator, founding member (and General Secretary) of the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress) and author of Mhudi, the first novel written in English by a black South African (published by Lovedale in 1930).3
Early black writers worked as journalists for the obvious reason that newspapers, along with the mission presses, provided almost their only outlet for expression. The early black press saw its purpose as being to inform and educate, and to provide a forum for opinion and a platform for protest. The most important of these newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s was Bantu World, founded in 1932 and taken over in 1933 by the Argus Printing and Publishing Company.4 Its editor during this period was R.V. Selope Thema. In his unpublished autobiography, “From Cattle-herding to the Editor’s Chair” (c. 1935) he constructs a master-narrative of his progress from childhood in a Pedi village to the editorship of Bantu World - a passage from
“barbarism” to “civilisation” (Switzer, “Bantu World” 191). These terms are echoed
1
This chapter draws on an article entitled “R.R.R. Dhlomo and the Early Black South African Short Story in English”, published in Current Writing 17.1 (2005): 52-69. I am grateful to Margaret Lenta for her editorial assistance.
2
I should acknowledge my indebtedness to the research of Tim Couzens, whose work in the 1970s helped rescue early black writing in English from decades of neglect. He published a number of articles in the 1970s; his doctoral thesis on H.I.E. Dhlomo was published as The New African: A Study of the
Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (1985). A recent number of English in Africa (Vol. 30, No. 2, 2003)
celebrates his contribution and includes a bibliography of his publications.
3
Plaatje’s life and achievements are the subject of Willan’s admirable study, Sol Plaatje: A Biography (1984). Plaatje, who was a young man at the time of the Anglo-Boer War, and died in 1932, represents an older generation of South African writer-intellectuals than the Dhlomo brothers: for the Dhlomos, he and John Dube, founder of the Ohlange Institute and Ilanga Lase Natal, would have been pioneering and revered figures. His novel was completed by 1920, but Plaatje could not find a publisher, until Lovedale eventually accepted it in 1930.
4
It was a weekly publication, containing both African-language and English-language sections, and by 1946 had a weekly circulation of 24,000. According to Switzer, it “helped shape the form as well as the content of South Africa’s captive black press in the generation after 1932” (Bantu World 192).
in the tribute paid to Bantu World in 1935 by the Pretoria News, also from the Argus stable:
In the pages of Bantu World we are able to catch a glimpse of the black races as they struggle from civilisation to barbarism, from ignorance to knowledge, from an Africa that has been theirs from the dawn of history to an Africa remoulded by . . . Western Europe – a hand of culture, but a hand that can chastise.
(Switzer 196). In terms of ideology5 and outlook, members of the Dhlomos’ generation of writers were aspirant middle-class, anxious to prove their “civilised” and
“progressive” credentials, and imbued with Christian norms and values. The members of this emergent group saw themselves as “new Africans” and were concerned to distance themselves both from both the tribal past and from the new marabi culture that had developed in the inner-city slumyards of Johannesburg. Couzens argues that a key text in understanding the Dhlomos and their generation is The African Yearly
Register: Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who’s Who) of Black Folks in South Africa (1930), compiled and edited by T.D. Mweli Skota. By
looking at these biographies of leading Africans of the time, one gains an appreciation of “the ethos from which the black writers of the 1930s sprang, their aspirations, their ideology and their class” (New African 1). He finds that the favourite terms of
approbation are “progressive”, “hard worker”, “good speaker”, “gentleman” and “true Christian”. In particular, the word “progressive” functions as “the ideological
touchstone or keyword of the whole book” (New African 6-7). Skota explains that his intention is to counter the view of Africans as “savages prone to witchcraft,
cannibalism and other vices credited to barbarians” (quoted in New African 4). Clearly one cannot underestimate the impact of the prevailing European (and missionary) view of Africa and Africans as primitive, backward, “heathen” – and in need of salvation and enlightenment. Skota’s publication is a modest attempt to counter this view of Africa and Africans – but it does so in terms largely dictated by the discourse of the coloniser and the missionary.
5
I use ideology here in a neutral sense to refer to the class (or racial or gendered) character of a particular system of ideas.