The intersection of experience, imaginative writing and meaningmaking in Es’kia Mphahlele

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South African Khoisan Literature in the Context of World Literary Discourse

I demonstrate how South African Khoisan literature enriches literary discourse in the global context, using the criteria of strangeness, cross-cultural dialogue and social cohesion. I consider the spatial-cultural inflections of Khoisan literary art from the theoretical perspective of Maurice Halbwachs’s 1950 concept of space and collective memory. I compare Khoisan and Northern Sotho folktales within the global and Southern African contexts. I intend to foreground how distinctively Khoisan discourses on postcolonial experiences find literary expression, adopting Tomaselli and Muller’s (1992:478) observation that ‘cultures are distinguished in terms of differing responses to the same social, material and environmental conditions.’ I argue that intercultural dialogue that an appreciation of strangeness may unlock, promotes social cohesion that would otherwise not be achieved.National Research Foundation (NRF) University of South Africa (Unisa)English Studie

Circumcision and Celebratory Orality among Some Black South African Cultural Groups

My premise in this study affirms views like those of Abraham (2015) that the African personality pervading all African cultures has selectively preserved its traditional identity even as it dealt with hybrity that has been a natural outcome of encounters with different cultural clusters. Krige and Krige (1943) and Nkadimeng (1973) describe broad cultural benefits of circumcision as practised among the BaloBedu of Rain Queen Modjadji and the BaPedi respectively, both of the Limpopo Province of South Africa, while Nyembezi et. al. (2014) dwell on the same among the AmaXhosa of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The writers mentioned above variously hint at and describe the content and benefits of African lore encoded in oral formulae taught in circumcision schools. Morton (2011) stretches the research by going further to emphasize self-praise compositions as prominent among the lessons learnt during traditional circumcision, analyzing examples from southern African countries. However, he does this without adequately analyzing the content of self-praises and their use beyond celebrations that mark completion of circumcision. I intend to fill this gap by probing how self-praises learnt during the arcane initiation period survive beyond returnee festivities, as well as scrutinize the content of such self-praises. I focused in my research on the Northern Ndebele cultural group concentrated in the Vaaltyn-Moshate area of the town of Mokopane, in the Limpopo Province of South Africa.University of South Africa National Research Foundation of South AfricaEnglish Studie

Oral literature and the evolving Jim-goes-to-town motif: Some early Northern Sotho compared to selected post-apartheid novels written in English

Professor Jessica Murray (Department of English Studies, UNISA), assisted with the translation of the abstract into Afrikaans.The continuation of the discourses of apartheid era African language literature characterized by the makgoweng motif in post-apartheid English literature written by black people has not been studied adequately. In this study I explored ways in which characters of Northern Sotho linguistic and cultural groups represented the same consciousness in both categories of novels across time. I used the qualitative method and analysed some Northern Sotho primary texts, written before democracy in South Africa, as well as selected post-apartheid English novels written by black people. I focused on the makgowen motif to examine the nature of continuity in theme and outlook. I found that the novels considered pointed to a sustainable consciousness, transcending linguistic boundaries and time. The social function of such characterization representing the formerly oppressed black people, is a revelation of their quest towards selfdefinition in a modern world. The portrayed characters significantly point to resilience among black people to appropriate modernity by making sense of the world in a manner sustaining their distinctive outlook. In this way, the Northern Sotho-speaking cultural groups display a consistent consciousness enabling them to manage properly their adaptation to an evolving modern or globalizing environment across time. The implication was that a comparison of South African English literature written by black people with indigenous language literature enriched the study of black South African English literature.University of South Africa (UNISA)English Studie

Post-apartheid transnationalism in black South African literature: a reality or a fallacy?

The quest of this paper is to probe whether globalising post-nationalism impacts on post- apartheid black South African English literature in a manner that suggests a blurring of distinctive African identities. This is done against the background that black South African literature right from its written beginnings in the early 19th century has coalesced into a taxonomically distinct entity forming a non-negligible component of South African literature written in English. I first analyse two post-apartheid novels written by the black writers Niq Mhlongo (Dog Eat Dog 2004) and Sindiwe Magona (Beauty’s Gift, 2008). Secondly, I consider three post-apartheid novels by the black writers Phaswane Mpe (Welcome to Our Hillbrow, 2001), Kgebetli Moele (Room 207, 2009) and Kopano Matlwa (Coconut, 2007). I approach an examination of the five post-apartheid novels by separating them into two categories, as a way of indicating that black South African literature of this era remains as stylistically varied as that of earlier periods, albeit broadly within a mould continuing to characterise it as black. In order to justify an underlying common allegiance to localised identity cutting across the two categories in which I place these five post-apartheid novels, evidence of such a pervasively black feature is explained inter-categorically, even as intra-categorical affinities are demonstrated. I trace these two levels of typology within the conceptual framework of two main groups of theorists. The first group consists of commentators such as Carrol Clarkson in her assertion that the identity of black Africans in the post-apartheid era as portrayed in the fiction of writers such as Phaswane Mpe is such that “educated and urbanised individuals should no longer identify” with and share beliefs having to do with African identity and “a common and accountable response to that which the community represents.” The attitude of these critics has led to Leon de Kock seeing both black and white post-apartheid literature warranting interpretation with a “sense of a post-national configuration—indeed, now a transnational constellation.” I demonstrate in this paper that post-apartheid fiction written by blacks not only defies theorists’ subordination of imaginative writers’ centrality in social discourse, but goes further specifically to chafe against normative characterisation as transnational. The second main category constituting the theoretical matrix within which I examine the discourses of the five selected novels includes theorists such as Rob Gaylard, in his observation that Es’kia Mphahlele “can be seen as the founder of a tradition of black writing that runs through writers like Miriam Tlali, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda to Phaswane Mpe,” with the thread splicing them together being a grounding of these authors’ writings in the philosophy or worldview of Afrikan Humanism

Es’kia Mphahlele’s etching of two axes of religion using the frame- work of his concept of Afrikan Humanism in Father Come Home

This article looks at Mphahlele’s application of his theory of Afrikan Humanism in his novel Father Come Home (1984). Since he regards religion as pervasive in the life of Africans, the novel is analysed from a religious perspective. The aim is to highlight the consciousness crossroads faced by the postcolonial African as portrayed in the book. It is proposed that a prior study of Mphahlele’s concept of Afrikan Humanism shall reveal more meaning in his fictional writings, as well as in the fiction of other postcolonial Africanist writers

Indigeneity in modernity. The cases of Kgebetli Moele and Niq Mhlongo

The study of South African English literature written by black people in the postapartheid period has focused, among others, on the so-called Hillbrow novels of Phaswane Mpe and Niq Mhlongo, and narratives such as Kgebetli Moele's Book of the Dead (2009) set in Pretoria. A number of studies show how the fiction of these writers handles black concerns that some critics believe to have replaced a thematic preoccupation with apartheid, as soon as political freedom was attained in 1994. However, adequate analyses are yet to be made of works produced by some of these black writers in their more rounded scrutiny of the first decade of democracy, apart from what one may describe as an indigenous/traditional weaning from preoccupation with the theme of apartheid. This study intends to fill this gap, as well as examine how such a richer social commentary is refracted in its imaginative critique of South African democratic life beyond its first decade of existence.  I consider Mhlongo's novels Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007); together with Moele's narratives reflecting on the same epoch Room 207 (2006) and The Book of the Dead (2009). For the portrayal of black lives after ten years of democracy, I unpack the discursive content of Mhlongo's and Moele's novels Way Back Home (2013) and Untitled (2013) respectively. I probe new ways in which these postapartheid writers critique the new living conditions of blacks in their novelistic discourses. I argue that their evolving approaches interrogate literary imaginaries, presumed modernities and visions on socio-political freedom of a postapartheid South Africa, in ways deserving critical attention.  I demonstrate how Moele and Mhlongo in their novels progressively assert a self-determining indigeneity in a postapartheid modernity unfolding in the context of some pertinent discursive views around ideas such as colourblindness and transnationalism. I show how the discourses of the author's novels enable a comparison both their individual handling of the concepts of persisting institutional racism and the hegemonic silencing of white privilege; and distinguishable ways in which each of the two authors grapples with such issues in their fiction depicting black conditions in the first decade of South African democratic rule, differently from the way they do with portrayals of the socio-economic challenges faced by black people beyond the first ten years of South African democracy

Representations of the National and Trans-national in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow

As creative agents of knowledge production in the domain of humanities knowledge, South African writers such as Phaswane Mpe have the historical burden of participating in the transformation of knowledge in ways that revolutionize the role of artistic performance with a view to prompting social transformation. In our context, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001) actively generates emergent grammars that underpin a transformational thrust through a distinctive transnational bent, where xenophobia and rural myopia are countered through a deliberative narrative of doubt cast on a putative insular South African-ness pitted against master narratives of national unity, on the one hand, and disruptive vectors such as HIV/AIDS and witchcraft, on the other. As a significant discourse that constitutes humanities knowledge, a novel such as Mpe’s contributesto a project’s transformation of knowledge in its departure from, and disavowal of, a totalizing master narrative of nationalism, putting in place a macabre post-national struggle of dystopia. It specifically tests the limits knowledge production and consumption around the topical issues of HIV/AIDS and immigration. It proceeds to show how Phaswane Mpe’s novel has successfully debunked myths of a privileged autochthonous habitus. The novel eschews characterising unstable homologies of the rural and urban divide and, in like manner, the South African and ‘foreigner’ bar, as a starting point for meaningful knowledge transformation about immigration and the HIV/ AIDS stigma through transnationalism and transculturation of language by way of an idiom of intertextuality represented by a transnational bent. We demonstrate throughout that transnationalism prompts a signifcation of cultural transformation in the novel under discussion, viz. Welcome to our Hillbrow.University of South Africa (UNISA)English Studie

Artistic Innovation Through Cultural Symbols: A Strategy for Sustainable Development in Kgebetli Moele's Room 207

Research grant to present the paper at the conference was given by Unisa, and TUT hosted the conference.This peer-reviewed book chapter looks at the post-1994 Hillbrow novel, Room 207 by Kgebetli Moele, (2006), with a view to tracing its thematic and stylistic successes or failures in branding indigenous African thinking as a niche market within today’s knowledge economy. The feature of any knowledge economy, including the stronghold of indigenous African thinking, assumed to be fundamental, is the ability to shape the past, present and future of contemporary societies in a manner that impacts positively on sustainable development. I argue that Moele’s novel manages to empower indigenous African thinking, in the manner in which Pradervand (1989: xvii) describes sustainable development from the socio-cultural vantage point as the ‘ability of the members of a community to relate creatively to themselves, their neighbours, their environment and the world at large, so that each one might express his maximum potential.’ I see an overlap between such a creative relationship with the environment and postcolonial African communities’ agentive self-definition. The paper attempts to demonstrate how the novel Room 207 can be seen as a worthy contribution to sustainable development in that its approach in addressing social challenges satisfies the needs of sustainable development according to writers such as Parry-Davies (2007), who describes sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Such a function of sustainable development is achievable through ‘care and respect for people, the planet and economic prosperity – with the three pillars of people, planet and prosperity satisfied simultaneously to ensure that the development does not suffer from an imbalance’ (Parry-Davies 2007). In the paper I intend to analyse Moele’s novel as an artistic innovation for social change, which harnesses an art product as a significant intersection of African cultural symbols, in the positive reinforcement of literature in the service of humanity to ensure sustainable development.Tshwane University of Technology, University of South AfricaEconomic

Micro and macro Intergenerational oral communication in the Zion Christian Church

This chapter looks at the cultural significance of poetry that is presented orally within the Zion Christian Church (ZCC). While such poetry belongs to the African Initiated Church's oral tradition, my method of analyzing this mode of oral tradition is one that assumes that as a source of oral history, oral data are situated within specific cultures. It is as a result of this vantage point that historians like Prins (1991:119) could observe that historians should not presume serial time in dealing with oral traditions of different peoples. He cautions that 'serial time is not the only sort of time that men use' (1991:119). The other Western hegemonic use approach of history writing that Prins (1991:119) would like to see changing is one in which change is seen as the main index of historical content because 'there are other things than change to explain.' I test these theoretical perspectives in my close analysis of the poetry aspect of the ZCC oral tradition, using the oral historical method.University of South Africa National Research Foundation of South Afric