/ 10 June 2005

Writing wrongs

A History of South African Literature

by Christopher Heywood

(Cambridge University Press)

The Languages and Literatures of Africa

by Alain Ricard

(James Currey, Africa World Press and David Philip)

In devoting review space to Christopher Heywood’s appalling A History of South African Literature, any reviewer runs a risk: does not paying it the compliment of a response suggest it merits attention in the first place? When it is a misconceived endeavour from the start (no coherent framework), carried through in an accumulating jumble (no system of organisation) and without any conclusion, is it not perhaps best left to sink into oblivion?

Already John Kannemeyer has awarded it a certain notoriety by hashing it in a two-page spread in Die Burger, in his view for its skew sampling of Afrikaans-language writers. Then another predecessor, Michael Chapman — also known for having weighed in with more than one fat, authoritative text on the same topic — has on LitNet registered how incensed he has every right to feel at likewise having his own disentangling of all the historiographical puzzles unacknowledged. (While two of Chapman’s anthologies are used extensively by Heywood, his name does not even appear in the index.)

Indeed, Heywood’s arrogant claim that his book, inevitably described as “magisterial”, is the first critical study of its subject simply astounds. For the record, such endeavours are widely known to date back as far as Sam Sly in 1855, making Heywood’s farrago about the 15th attempt.

But my beef with Heywood’s dreadful squandering must be against the publishers who commissioned him, Cambridge University Press. How could such a substandard mishmash ever have gotten into print, with names misspelt (“Cilliers” for “Celliers”, “Ramp(h)olokeng” and then even “Ghandi”) and with figures conflated (poor poet Chris Mann will find himself enjambed with Peter Horn as “Peter Mann”)? Why call the Nobel prize-winner JM Coetzee “John Coetzee” throughout, when John Coetzee is actually another writer? Why include works in the bibliography that are not dealt with in the text, while omitting others that are? Such elementary blunders are everywhere.

Worse are the structural problems. Why attempt to deal with the recently deceased Guy Butler before Roy Campbell (who died in 1957)? Why handle Bosman’s Mafeking Road story (twice), but not within the section devoted to that turn-of-the-century war? And to suggest the key to all of Bosman is his “anti-Hamitism” must be eliciting some guffaws from limbo. Then yes, the boxer King Kong must have felt pretty “alienated” from his girlfriend (since he stabbed her to death), and no, the musical was not banned during the apartheid era. And no, Sol Plaatje’s oral collection has not been lost, as a visit to the Plaatje Museum in Kimberley would verify (in fact, it has all been recently reprinted there).

And how much time could Professor Heywood have put in at the National English Language Museum in Grahamstown, when it is not even called that? Although South African-born, he has grown so out of touch with matters local that he can delude himself there is such a thing as “a tradition of Anglo-Afrikaans writers from Thomas Pringle to Antjie Krog” — even though half of his text examines the conflicts between the two factions.

As far as the other three traditions go (the blurb says four), Heywood’s mastery of the Khoisan /’Auni must remain an open question, while the notion that Sergei Eisenstein developed Russian cinema thanks to Bushman art is batty. As for the poor Indian tradition, it gets two sentences only (twice). Heywood’s effort is part of the Cambridge Africa Collection, to be distributed only in the sub-Sahara. The principle that such shoddy work would pass with us is insulting.

By contrast there is Alain Ricard’s hefty The Languages and Literatures of Africa, 10 years in the translating and elaborating from the French original. Although here is “Ghandi” again, our Buthelezi is no longer known as “Gatsha” and, frankly, nor do our oralisers still tripple across the “veldt”, these are minor tics the local co-publisher David Philip should have corrected. But, for the rest, Ricard’s superb survey pulls together the combined richnesses, past and present, in the wake of many earlier skilful comparatists — such as Albert Gerard, Chris Swane-poel and Liz Gunner — all amply acknowledged and taken further.

The pull of French-language evangelisers and transcribers is naturally more familiar to him (Ricard is Paris-based), which means that Thomas Mofolo of Lesotho, for example, who came under the Paris Mission Society, receives a fuller press than, say, Sol Plaatje, who fell more under Shakespeare’s spell. To give but one example, calling writers so situated “digraphic” (writing in more than one language), a clear-eyed theoretician like Ricard may, with one go, elucidate the scene, while Heywood is left miles behind in the coils of a notion he insists on defining as creolisation.

Ricard’s wonderful, reliable and illuminating coverage is also to be distributed continent-wide. Need this reviewer add which of these two works he feels Africa deserves?