Displacement in the literary texts of black Afrikaans writers in South Africa.

Summary

This article focuses on the representation of physical displacements in literary texts by black Afrikaans writers. These representations can be seen against the background of a complex history of colonisation and decolonisation in South Africa. On the one hand the relatively young Afrikaans literature tells of the way in which a sense of place was established by European settlers and their descendants by representing the transformation of space into place through various processes of naming, mapping, description, story-telling and mythologising; on the other hand Afrikaans literature also represents the various displacements suffered by the colonised peoples of South Africa. Attention is first given to the figurative displacement of the black Afrikaans writer with regards to the canon of Afrikaans literature and the possibility of reading the work of black Afrikaans writers as a "minor literature" (as defined by Deleuze and Guattari). The article then proceeds to discuss the physical displacements represented in literary texts by black Afrikaans writers in the following categories: the displacements brought about by the appropriation of land by European colonisers, the displacements resulting from the forced removals under certain apartheid laws as well as the displacement caused by imprisonment or exile. Finally attention is also given to a text that attempts to reverse earlier displacements.

Opsomming

Hierdie artikel doen ondersoek na die representasie van verplasing vanaf 'n bepaalde plek in die literere tekste van swart Afrikaanse skrywers. Die ondersoek vind plaas teen die agtergrond van die sterk bemoeienis met plek in die Afrikaanse letterkunde waarin daar enersyds sprake is van die wyse waarop ruimte omskep is in plek deur Europese setlaars en hulle afstammelinge deur prosesse soos benoeming, kartering, beskrywing, vertelling en mitologisering en andersyds ook van die wyse waarop die gekoloniseerde mense van Suid-Afrika verplaas is van bepaalde plekke. Nadat daar aandag gegee is aan die figuurlike verplasing van die swart Afrikaanse skrywer binne die konteks van die kanon van die Afrikaanse letterkunde en die moontlikheid om die werk van swart Afrikaanse skrywers te lees in terme van die begrip "klein letterkunde" (soos omskryf deur Deleuze en Guattari) word die representasie van verplasing in die werk van swart Afrikaanse skrywers in die volgende kategoriee bespreek: verplasing deur die koloniale appropriasie van grond, die verplasing deur gedwonge verhuisings gedurende die apartheidsjare, die verplasing deur gevangenskap en die verplasing deur ballingskap. Ten slotte word daar ook aandag gegee aan 'n teks waarin daar gepoog word om die eertydse verplasings om te keer.

1 Displacement and the Black Afrikaans Writer

Place and the experience of displacement are both important features of Afrikaans literature. This can be attributed to the fact that it originated against the background of a complex history of colonisation and decolonisation in South Africa. On the one hand the relatively young Afrikaans literature tells of the way in which a sense of place was established by European settlers and their descendants by representing the transformation of space into place through various processes of naming, mapping, description, story-telling and mythologising. On the other hand it also represents the various displacements suffered by the colonised peoples of South Africa and the way in which they contested the appropriation of space. Although it is conceded by writers on postcoloniality that the displacement caused by colonisation can take on several forms, there is a tendency to use the term displacement to describe the experience of settler writers trying to describe a new land in which their mother tongue does not "fit" (cf. Ashcroft 2001: 124, 153; also Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995:391). Consequently these discussions tend to overlook the ways in which the literatures of colonised peoples represent the experience of displacement. For this reason this paper wants to focus on the specific and localised ways in which the texts of black Afrikaans writers deal with the displacements they suffered under colonial and neocolonial rule in South Africa.

Although the discussion of displacement in the literary texts of these writers will focus on the physical displacements from certain places described by black Afrikaans writers, another form of displacement must be addressed namely the figurative displacement visible in the relationship of black Afrikaans writing to the Afrikaans literary canon which has been dominated mostly by white Afrikaans writing. Any discussion of the way in which black Afrikaans writers represent displacement must take into account the fact that they produce their literary texts in a language with a highly ambivalent status. (1) Afrikaans currently has about six million mother-tongue speakers of whom more than half are of mixed racial descent. On the one hand it can be seen as a language closely associated with colonialism because it developed from the Dutch spoken by the first colonisers of South Africa, was appropriated by Afrikaner nationalism to legitimise the existence of an Afrikaner nation and came to be associated with the oppressors of apartheid. On the other hand Afrikaans can also be seen as an indigenous language whose development was heavily indebted to those speakers (2) excluded by Afrikaner nationalism's racial bias and as a language used by many as instrument in the struggle against apartheid. It was therefore, at the same time, the language of the oppressor and the oppressed. The displacement suffered by these writers is therefore not the displacement suffered by settlers who struggle to "fit" their language on a foreign country. These writers use a mother tongue that can be seen as partly colonial, partly indigenous to describe places and a land they have always experienced as their own.

A cursory overview of black Afrikaans writing reveals that from the 1940's until the early 1990's black Afrikaans writers were mostly poets, with the names of S.V. Petersen, P.J. Philander, Adam Small and Lionel Sheldon dominating until the mid-seventies and those of Julian de Wette, Vernie February, Hein Willemse, Frank Anthony, Peter Snyders, Patrick Petersen, Clinton V. du Plessis, Vincent Oliphant and Marius Titus emerging from the late-seventies onwards. It is only since 1994 that the novel (3) has gained importance as a genre in black Afrikaans writing with the work of writers like A.H.M. Scholtz, S.P. Benjamin, E.K.M. Dido and Kirby van der Merwe. It is also conspicuous that women are underrepresented in this group. The work of black Afrikaans women poets can only be found in anthologies or self-publications with a limited exposure and only one woman, E.K.M. Dido, has so far published novels. An early overview of the field (Gerwel 1985: 21) shows that sociopolitical themes have dominated writing by black Afrikaans writers. Subsequent studies (Willemse 1995; Van Wyk 1999; Coetzee 2002) have identified certain characteristics: black Afrikaans writers often rewrote history from the perspective of the marginalised; they articulated the experience of their own communities who were the source of their literary production; through their literary texts they educated these communities to become their audience; they often wrote from the perspective of the working class; they were highly conscious of the writer's political role (although this was questioned by some writers); they felt that their work had to be accessible in order to be read at meetings and cultural events, especially during the struggle against apartheid in the eighties; they often used the vernacular form, sometimes called "Kaaps", as a language of subversion and resistance to oppression.

A discussion of the way in which black Afrikaans writers represented the physical displacements imposed on them during the course of South African history, must also take cognisance of certain specifics of the discourse around black Afrikaans writing. Coetzee (2002) argues that, seen from a Foucauldian perspective, it is a discursive formation marked by certain discontinuities, amongst which discussions around the choice to use the term "black". Although most of the Afrikaans writers and academics discussed in this article are of mixed racial descent, many of them find the use of the term "coloured" ("kleurling") racist and offensive because of its associations with the history of racism and oppression in South Africa (cf. February 1981: vii). It was against this background that a deliberate ideological choice was made to refer to themselves as black, thereby placing themselves and their writing in the political arena. The use of the term brought solidarity amongst Afrikaans writers who were excluded from the discourse of white Afrikaans privilege and constructed the black Afrikaans writer as a non-Afrikaner, Afrikaans-speaking, nonhegemonic writer who wanted to fragment the notion of a homogeneous other and thus deprive the establishment of its power to typify and stereotype it as that other (cf. Coetzee 2002:154-155). (4)

Although strong feelings of resistance to the use of the term "coloured" persist, it has resurfaced in discussions around the question of coloured identities and its relationship to black identities since 1994. Zoe Wicomb uses the term in her discussion of "the textual construction, ethnographical self-fashioning and political behaviour of coloureds in South Africa" (1998: 92), but finally argues against "fabricating a totalizing colouredness" and for "multiple belongings" to a number of coloured microcommunities whose interests conflict and overlap (p. 105). Erasmus (2001:18-19) notes that the discourse of the struggle years during which coloured people adopted the term "black" as "an inclusive political identity marking" did not acknowledge "the specificity of coloured experience or the heterogeneity and locatedness of blackness". She (p. 21) too argues for a reimagination of coloured identities that will move beyond the notion of "mixed race", seeing them as "cultural identities comprising detailed bodies of knowledge, specific cultural practices, memories, rituals and modes of being". The novelists A.H.M. Scholtz and E.K.M. Dido use the term "brown" or "coloured" rather than "black" in their literary texts and when they refer to themselves. Writers like S.P. Benjamin and Kirby van der Merwe have said that they prefer to be known simply as Afrikaans writers rather than black Afrikaans writers. In order to align my own discussion of these literary texts with the discourse I will also refer to black Afrikaans writing, trying to point out the ambiguities or discontinuities when they arise.

Finally it might also be asked whether a discussion of texts by black Afrikaans writers as a group separate from other Afrikaans writers does not perpetuate outdated racial divisions and raise the possibility of ghettoisation. Separating the work of these writers from that of white Afrikaans writers does, however, enable the researcher to acknowledge and recognise the specificity of the experiences they register in their texts. Not separating their work from the larger body of Afrikaans literature can lead to a perpetuation of existing power imbalances in the Afrikaans literary system through which the work of black Afrikaans writers have often been marginalised in the past (cf. Petersen 1997: 33-34). Both Pakendorf (1993: 104) and Coetzee (2002: 162) have pointed out the possible gains of reading black Afrikaans writing as a separate discursive formation within the larger context of Afrikaans literature. They suggest that the relationship between black Afrikaans literature and the Afrikaans literary canon might be read in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's insights about a minor literature in Kafka. Pour une litterature mineure (1975). In this work they define a minor literature not as the literature of a minor language, but as the literature of a minority that uses the language of a majority. They also point out the following characteristics of such a minor literature: the language of the majority is deterritorialised by the minor literature; everything written in the minor literature is of a political nature; everything produced in the minor literature has collective value. Because of this the minor literature has the potential to subvert hegemonic structures and question its own displacement from the centre. All of these characteristics can be found in black Afrikaans literature, thus constantly alerting the reader to the subversive qualities of black Afrikaans literature with regards to entrenched hegemonies, both before and after the democratisation of South Africa in 1994.

My discussion of the physical displacements represented in the work of black Afrikaans writers must be read against the background of this perspective on black Afrikaans literature and will be restricted to the following categories: the displacements brought about by the appropriation of land by European colonisers, the displacements resulting from the forced removals under certain apartheid laws as well as the displacement caused by imprisonment or resulting from hostile political policies. Finally I will look at a text that attempts to reverse earlier displacements.

2 Displacements in the Literary Texts by Black Afrikaans Writers

2.1 Displacements by Colonisation and the Appropriation of Land

Displacements caused by colonisers' appropriation of land are dealt with in two important texts by black Afrikaans writers: a volume of poetry titled Vuurklip [Flintstone] (5) published in 1960 by the poet P.J. Philander and the novel Vatmaar published in 1995 by the writer A.H.M. Scholtz. Both these texts rewrite South African history to include the histories of the marginalised, to supplement official narratives about the settlement of land and to contest existing claims on land.

Gerwel (1985: 14-15) comments on the importance of Philander's work in retrieving the "neglected histories" of South Africa's indigenous peoples and cites Willemse's appraisal of the way in which these histories are rewritten to present a positive picture of its main figures. One can also see these representations of the displacements suffered by indigenous peoples as an attempt to reclaim the past and the land, if only by textualising it from the perspective of the oppressed. The central poems in Philander's volume are monologues by historical figures descended from the indigenous peoples of southern Africa: a Herero leader from Namibia as well as the Khoi leaders Jager Afrikaner, his son Jonker Afrikaner and the Namibian leader Hendrik Witbooi. The volume is framed by short introductory and concluding poems and also include two shorter poems which comment on history from different perspectives. On the level of content the poems subvert the official histories of the time by supplying an alternative view. On a formal and structural level, however, they conform to the aesthetic standards of the time, adhering to strict metric, rhythmic and rhyme schemes.

It is especially the monologue of Jager Afrikaner (Philander 1960: 4-12) in this volume that illustrates the consecutive stages of displacement suffered by the Khoi, one of the indigenous groups disturbed by the arrival of European settlers in South Africa. The monologue consists of three poems with place names as titles: "Tulbagh" (pp. 4-6), "Hantam" (pp. 7-9) and "Grootrivier" (pp. 10-12). Sources (cf. Pool 1995: 1-19) tell that Jager Afrikaner's father, Klaas Afrikaner, was a Khoi captain whose land was appropriated by white settlers who renamed it Tulbagh (cf. "Tulbagh"). As a result he decided to enter the service of the white settler Pieter Pienaar and eventually moved to the Hantam with him. Jager Afrikaner succeeded his father and had to flee further north after Pienaar was killed in a confrontation in 1796 (cf. "Hantam"). He settled on an island in the Gariep river (cf. "Grootrivier"). The sequence of place names (Tulbagh, Hantam, Grootrivier) in the titles of the three poems therefore demonstrates the displacement ever further away from the centre of colonial power at the Cape.

Philander's three-part poem about Jager Afrikaner depicts a historical figure displaced and driven ever further away from the places he used to inhabit. It also paints the picture of a figure who is confident about his ability to adapt to new places; (6) but balances it with the nostalgia for the spaces he was displaced from. (7) The psychological portrait of Jager Afrikaner is filled out by the use of motifs that hint at his recurrent feelings of guilt (the references to the blue eyes of the white man who was murdered and to the "watergees" [water spirit] that guides him but also holds him accountable for his cruelties) as well as doubt whether he will be able to find a secure place that he will be able to call home: "Is daar nerens in die wye land / 'n tuiste en vrede wat ek mag he?" [Is there nowhere in this wide land / a home and peace that I might have?] (p. 12). From historical sources it is known that Jager Afrikaner was converted to Christianity by the missionary Ebner (Pool 1995: 40). Philander underplays this aspect in his portrait of Jager Afrikaner by introducing references to the "watergees" [water spirit] of indigenous mythology rather than to Christianity. The poem "Jonker Afrikaner" in Philander's most recent volume Trialoog [Trialogue] (2002) returns to the history of this family, with the focus on Jager Afrikaner's son Jonker. Again he uses the reference to the blue eyes of the murdered white man, feelings of guilt about disrespect for the water spirit and distrust of the missionaries whose God is blamed for the drought.

The first of two shorter poems inserted between the monologues spoken by figures from indigenous history reacts against the appropriation of space justified by the religious teachings of missionaries. The narrator in "Die jaar van die huis" [The Year of the House] (Philander 2002: 13-14) is highly suspicious of the missionaries, declaring that they want to restrict the movements of the indigenous peoples to the space circumscribed by "die skadu's van sy kerk" [the shadows of his church]) (p. 14). He also expresses the fear that they will once more become squatters on their own land if they give in to the missionaries' requests.

In the other short poem, "Die klippe praat" [The Stones Talk] (Philander 2002:21), the narrator is a representative of the San people who are the oldest inhabitants of the land in question and were displaced from the land they occupied as hunter-gatherers by both the Khoi and European settlers. The title refers to the famous rock paintings made by the San in sites all over South Africa. It also contains a reference to the Biblical admonishment that the stones will call out against certain injustices. These rock paintings that date back thousands of years are represented as signs of the San's ownership of the land appropriated by the European settlers. The poem states that the legal papers kept in colonial archives by white settlers are false and worthless when set against the San paintings that engrave their mastery on the rock faces of the land:</p> <pre> Sedert die Rijger, Goede Hoop en Drommedaris /bewaar julle valse stukke by die argivaris. / In die wande ingegraveer / is ons baasskap verewig teen wind en weer. [Since the Rijger, Goede Hoop and Drommedaris / you have been keeping false papers in the archive. / Our ownership will endure for ever against wind and rain / because it stands engraved on rock.] (Philander 2002:21) </pre> <p>The title of the poem also implies that there is something elemental and "natural" to the San's ownership of the land because the rocks and stones of the land under dispute proclaim it. (The title says: "die klippe praat" [The Stones Talk].) Their exceptional knowledge of and intimacy with the land places them on a par with the plants and animals rooted in the land and gives them a natural claim on the land as theirs:</p> <pre> Net ons soos dier en plant / ken al die drinkplekke in die sand / sal tot die einde met klou, tand / en bitter wortels bly in die land. [It is only we who know all the drinking places in the sand / like the animals and plants / and will stay in this land with claw, tooth / and bitter root until the end.] (Philander 2002: 21) </pre> <p>Thus the landownership of the San is "naturalised" and that of the groups coming after them disputed as artificial and invalid. There is a certain irony in the fact that the argument of a "natural" claim to the land that Philander employs in this poem is often used in nationalistic art and literature to justify a certain group's claims on the basis of a historical bond with the land, their special understanding of it and their ability to capture it in art.

The concluding poems in the volume contradict the self-confidence and assertiveness of the preceding poems, replacing the tone of resistance with that of despondency. "Museum" (Philander 2002: 33) refers to the fact that both the San and Khoi and their way of life have been reduced to museum exhibits. It is also a reference to the now disputed practice of including the San and Khoi in exhibits in museums of natural rather than cultural history. The final stanzas of the poem go back to the original reasons for European settlement at the Cape in 1652 and refer to the fact that the inhabitants of South Africa (especially its indigenous peoples) had to pay dearly for the merchandise of the Dutch East India Company taken from the East to Europe via the Cape of Good Hope. With this Philander casts a cynical eye on European settlement in South Africa, taking a line not known in the official histories of the time. Although Philander's volume did not make a significant impact on the Afrikaans literary canon at the time of its publication, it must be seen as an ideological if not stylistic forerunner of the way in which Afrikaans literature would start to question white hegemony and landownership in South Africa from the sixties onwards. In this respect it plays the subversive, even revolutionary, role ascribed to a minor literature by Deleuze and Guattari.

Whereas Philander's rewriting of South Africa's history of displacement dates from the nineteen-sixties, A.H.M. Scholtz's novel Vatmaar was published in 1995 after the transition to democracy in South Africa. The fact that Scholtz published his novel at the age of seventy-two is in itself significant and can be related to the experience of the people marginalised by South Africa's race politics and their empowerment after 1994. Scholtz's novel was originally written in English with Afrikaans dialogue, then translated into Afrikaans and after that reworked by Scholtz. According to his publisher (Van der Merwe 1996: 26) he originally wrote the text in English because he did not receive any schooling in his mother tongue Afrikaans and was discouraged from using the language in his creative writing by its reputation as language of the oppressor. It was only after 1994 and through the intervention of Kwela Books that publishes texts written by members of previously marginalised communities, (8) that writers like Scholtz started publishing their work and enjoying great success with it in South Africa and abroad. (9)

Scholtz's novel tells of the way in which the small settlement Vatmaar was established after the Anglo Boer War ended in 1902 and charts its history until the beginning of the nineteen-thirties. The name of the settlement Vatmaar is a concise summary of the history of displacement dealt with in this novel that combines the narratives of a variety of characters. After the war Uncle Chai, who is a Cape coloured, gets permission from the mining company and the town council of Du Toitspan (a reference to Kimberley) to establish a settlement near Du Toitspan as a reward for serving as a soldier in the British forces during the war. Although the land originally belonged to the forefathers of his Griqua friend, Ta Vuurmaak, they have to get permission from the British colonial government to establish a settlement and then only in a spot that the white community finds worthless enough to give away. (The word "vatmaar" refers to something negligible enough to be taken.) In this settlement they have no property rights, as can be gathered from the way in which land was given out:</p> <pre> 'n Erfvan twee morg bet vyftien sjielings gekos--die weekloon van die meeste werksvolk. Dit was net vir die hoekpenne wat die dorpsraad se opmeter kom aanwys het, want net die hoekpenne was joune, nie die erf nie. [A plot of two morgen cost fifteen shillings--a week's earnings for most labourers. This was only for the corner posts which the town council's surveyor came to plant, because only the comer posts were yours, not the plot itself.] (Scholtz 1995: 1) </pre> <p>Scholtz's novel does not only record marginalised histories, but it is also the story of a hybrid community in which a variety of groups coexists. As such, their story functions as a model for an integrated South African society. The novel is preceded by a note to the reader in which the author suggests that the coloured community of South Africa are the truly indigenous inhabitants of South Africa because they originated in the country:</p> <pre> Ek gaan 'n storie vertel van die bruinmense van Suid-Afrika. Hulle her hie uit die Noorde gekom nie en ook nie van oorsee af nie. Hulle het hier ontstaan, opregte Suid-Afrikaners wat dalk eendag Azaniers genoem sal word. [I am going to tell a story of the brown people of South Africa. They did not come from the north, neither did they come from overseas. They originated right here, true South Africans  that will perhaps one day be called Azanians.] (Scholtz 1995: Epigraph) </pre> <p>As in Philander's volume of poetry, there is an ambivalence in Scholtz's novel: on the one hand there is a tendency to "naturalise" the Vatmaar community's land rights by suggesting that they belong to the land because they were "made" in it; on the other hand the narrative historicises the displacement suffered by the people in this community by detailing the processes involved. Both these texts react to the displacements caused by the colonial appropriation of land by rewriting history from the perspective of the displaced and oppressed. The discussion of these texts also shows that the discourse on black Afrikaans writing is indeed marked by the discontinuities that Coetzee (2002) pointed out. Philander started publishing his work before the insistence on the signifier "black Afrikaans writer" came about and before Scholtz, who published his first novel after the advent of democratisation in 1994, referred to himself and the people he wrote about as "bruin" (brown).

2.2 Displaced by Forced Removals

Displacement of another kind affected the lives of South Africans who were not white when the already existing racial discrimination was codified by a series of laws promulgated after the National Party came to power in 1948 (Worden [1994] 1995: 95). The Group Areas Act of 1950 established separate living spaces for whites, blacks, coloureds and Indians and restricted ownership and the occupation of land to a specific group. This policy of residential segregation brought about the forced removals of people from residential areas reserved for other groups, the most infamous being the removal of the inhabitants of Sophiatown in Johannesburg to the new township at Soweto in 1955 (Worden [1994]1995: 96) and the removal of 65 000 coloured people who lived in Cape Town's District Six in the second half of the sixties (Giliomee 2002: 505). Both these events resonated in a wide variety of literary texts by South African writers: amongst the black Afrikaans writers it was especially Adam Small who wrote about the displacements caused by apartheid laws and the forced removal from District Six.

Small published his first volume of poetry in 1958, and voiced his strongest resistance to the inhuman policies of apartheid in three volumes of poetry in which he used a vernacular form of Afrikaans that he himself called Kaaps [Cape Afrikaans] ([1962] 1973: 9) to comment on the distress of the poor and oppressed: Kitaar my kruis [Guitar my Cross] ([1962] 1973), Se Sjibbolet [Say Shibboleth] (1963) and Oos wes tuis bes Distrik Ses [East West Home is Best District Six] (Small & Jansen 1973). The vernacular is often combined with a religious discourse and satire (10) to voice his criticism of apartheid's oppressive policies. The introductory poem in the volume Kitaar my kruis, "Ko, lat ons sing" [Come let us Sing] (Philander [ 1962] 1973:11-12) depicts a lay preacher who must lead his people from oppression with his guitar like Moses led the Israelites from Egypt. (The reference to the guitar suggests that the preacher represents the artist, even poet who has the responsibility to liberate his people.) In the poem "Bruin prediker" [Coloured Preacher] (pp. 78-81) the central figure becomes a Joshua who invokes his congregation to sing so that the walls of Jericho can fall.

A number of the poems in the volume also rely on an identification of the poor and oppressed with the suffering Christ. The poem "Lydingsweg" [Way of the Cross] (Small [ 1962] 1973:17-18) is narrated by the inhabitants of slum areas who state that they have lost all hope of being saved by God, so that they are now identifying themselves with Christ on the way of the cross. (11) In the poem "Groot Krismisgabet" [Big Christmas Prayer] (pp. 19-22) Christ is implored to help those who live in slum areas like Windermere, District Six and Blouvlei on the grounds that he has known poverty himself in the stable where he was born. In "Lied vannie gamiente vannie Here" [Song of the Congregation of the Lord] (pp. 23-24) Christ is thanked for delivering the poor from slum areas like District Six, Windermere and Cook se Bos, presumably through the message of hope that he brings. God the Father is seen as silent and unrelenting as in the poem "O oppas, oppas ..." [O Beware, Beware ...] (pp. 57-59). Here the narrator calls upon a tacitum God who neglects to intervene in the case of Johnnie and Joanie whose happiness is destroyed when they are told to demolish their house because it is in a white neighbourhood.

Several poems in these two volumes refer to the displacements caused by apartheid laws. There are poems that comment on the Separate Amenities Act (1953) that prevented whites and non-whites from worshipping in the same church ("'n Feestelike seisoen" [A Festive Season]; p. 66), from sharing a seat in a bus ("Vryheid" [Freedom], pp. 39-43), from living in the same areas ("Bruin prediker" [Coloured Preacher]; pp. 78-81) and using the same beaches ("Non-White Pleasure Resort"; p. 43 and "Latterday Leiding" [Latterday Guidance]; p. 45). The poem "Second Coming II" (pp. 38-39) satirically refers to a "separate" second coming of the Lord in which he made a separate appearance for his non-white followers in one of the amenities designated by the apartheid government. The Immorality Act which prohibited sexual relations between people of different races is criticised in "What abou' de lo?" (pp. 52-54), a poem that gained iconic importance in the struggle for liberation during the eighties.

Small's third volume Oos wes tuis bes Distrik Ses [East West Home is Best District Six] is devoted in its entirety to the displacement caused by the forced removals from District Six. This volume records life in District Six and its demolition in the wake of the forced removals in a series of poems by Small and photographs by Chris Jansen. An interesting disparity exists between the poems and the pictures accompanying them. The poems depict a point in time where the removals and the demolition have been completed whereas the pictures accompanying them record life in District Six before its demolition. The pictures show life in District Six; the poems mourn the removal of life from District Six. To cite a few examples: pictures of a variety of District Six buildings are combined with a poem that reminds a "proud ou gabou" [proud old building] (12) that it will soon be demolished; a picture of a young boy leading a blind man is accompanied by a poem that refers to a song in which someone is reminded to pack his things and leave ("Tok tik tik tok"); a picture of a mosque is placed next to a poem describing people praying in the mosque while contractors are breaking down walls ("Oppie top vannie mosque"). Only one picture in the volume shows a distraught-looking man against the background of bulldozed buildings: the accompanying poem refers to the fact that bulldozers destroyed everything but also calls upon the people of District Six to overcome the tragedy. The fact that one of the established Afrikaans publishers, Human and Rousseau, published this expensive publication shows that the District Six removal was highly contentious, even amongst white Afrikaners. It also reminds one of Willemse' s (1999: 9-16) observation that the first generation of black Afrikaans writers like Petersen, Philander and Small was absorbed into the Afrikaans literary canon, whereas the struggle poets who published their work after 1976 were excluded from the canon until recently.

Like Sophiatown, District Six has come to play the role of an iconic reminder of the losses suffered during the struggle against oppression in South African culture. In recent years warnings have been sounded against a politics of nostalgia that sentimentalises the loss of District Six and tries to construct a totalising coloured identity located in a mythologised District Six as ethnic homeland (Wicomb 1998: 94-96). Although Van Wyk (1999:151) refers to the fact that the romanticisation of place is often used to counteract the feelings of displacement caused by different forms of colonisation, my own feeling is that Small's poems are too angry and cynical to be considered a sentimentalisation of District Six. The danger of presenting it as an ethnic homeland is avoided by treading a delicate balance between emphasising the ethnicity of the people involved (through the use of Cape Afrikaans as well as specific names like Moegamat, Toefie, Salama, Dennie Samuels, Antie Rosiena, etc.) on the one hand and representing them simply as "young lovers", "'n kind" [a child], "Ou Mamma" [Old Momma], "die city se commuters" [the city's commuters] and "die labour force" [the labour force] on the other hand.

The poet Achmat Dangor also writes in Afrikaans about the displacements caused by forced removals. Although he writes mostly in English, his volume Bulldozer published in 1983 contains a number of poems in Afrikaans that also deal with the subject. The series of poems titled "Bulldozer" makes use of a double-voiced discourse: on the one hand the narrative voice is that of a shack-dweller who uses a vernacular form of Afrikaans (reminiscent of the voice in Small's poems); on the other hand it is the voice of someone capable of sophisticated reflection on the events. As a whole, the series of poems employs different strategies to voice the distress about the displacement caused by the forced removals. The first poem "Bulldozer" (Dangor 1983:61) depicts the negative effects of the removals on the white "jockey" operating the bulldozer. The second poem "Bulldozer II" (p. 62) deliberately sentimentalises the past, painting a happy picture to set negative thoughts aside whereas the third (p. 63) is heavily ironical in setting the hardships of living in a squatter camp against the living death of being buried in the regimented group area that they were removed to. In the fourth poem (p. 64) the removal from a shack to a delegated group area becomes a metaphor for life. The speaker again addresses his pal with whom he can identify in the sense that they share the same lot: he points out that his "liewende karkas / is die pondok van jou siel" [living carcass / is the shack of his soul] and that he is but "'n squatter innie / squatterkamp van Tyd" [a squatter in the / squatter camp of Time].

Although the forced removals recorded in the "Bulldozer" poems are not situated in District Six, this place name also appears in the other poems in Dangor's volume. On the one hand, these poems in English present District Six in stark and unsentimental terms. Wicomb (1998: 96) quotes a character in Bessie Head's The Cardinals who expresses his disgust at the stereotype of the District Six prostitute "walking down Hanover Street and shaking her behind". Dangor undermines this quaint stereotype by representing District Six as a grotesque Madam that will find herself in the arms of a white man after its demolition in "Elegy for a Queen" (pp. 48-49):</p> <pre> Your history is an array / of armpit odours, / the dankness of dark alleys, / salt and sweat / and the reek of silence / in an unwashed mouth. //But soon you will lie / in the arms of a gentleman, / a rich man dressed in white, / or a white man himself, / and he too will stink / of your irrevocable death.

(Dangor 1983: 48-49) </pre> <p>On the other hand there is a tendency to pander to the representation of District Six as the place of the "collective birth" of the coloured people (Wicomb 1998: 94) when it is called the "koel paradys / van Afrika" [cool paradise / of Africa] and especially "rots van my geskiedenis" [rock of my history] (p. 94).

The forced removals from District Six also features in the poem "Ek missie Ses" [I Miss the Six] (pp. 42-43) in a volume by Loit Sols, My straat en anne praat-poems [My Street and Other Talk Poems] (1998).

The poem is written "vi' aalie victims van forced removals" [all the victims of forced removals]. The narrator in this three-part poem talks to his dead grandfather about his nostalgia for District Six, weaving details about the hardship of life under apartheid into the narrative. He refers to his classification as "other-coloured", the sounds of bulldozers and guns and the fumes of petrol bombs.

The poet Patrick Petersen addresses another form of displacement in his poems about farm workers in the volume Vergenoeg [Far Enough] (1993). In poems like "Bly dankie" [Stay Thank You] (p. 58), "Onverdiend" [Undeserved] (p. 65) he refers to impoverished farm labourers who are forced to leave the farms they spent their working lives on when their labour is no longer wanted. In both cases Petersen combines his lyric with extracts from newspaper articles reporting on this kind of displacement to drive his point home. In "Bly dankie" [Stay Thank You] the narrator is a farm labourer who speaks in the vernacular and indirectly exposes the injustice of this kind of displacement. In "Onverdiend" [Undeserved] it is the embittered voice of the poet that comments directly on the way in which these labourers are treated by their employers.

It is conspicuous that Small, and Dangor, Sols, and Petersen voice their protest about the displacement caused by forced removals in a vernacular form of Afrikaans. Rive (1985: 67) criticised the use of this medium during the nineteen-eighties for potentially bolstering the apartheid system by emphasising group recognition through dialect and promoting an exclusive colouredism. Rather than employing the vernacular to add a dimension of authenticity, Rive (p. 68) felt that writers should use a vernacular such as Kaaps "to expose the legalised socio-political deprivation that has created it". Loit Sols refers to the language he uses in his "praat-poems" in the post-apartheid era as "Goema" and describes it as "'n hele mix bredie" [a totally mixed stew] in the poem "Goema" (1998:18-19). I concur with other commentators that the use of the vernacular destabilises white Afrikaners' ideas of cultural superiority by destabilising the norms and standards of existing Afrikaans. Van Wyk (1999: 134-135) reads it as a Bakhtinian hybridisation and carnivalisation of language whereas Pakendorf (1993: 104) and Coetzee (2002: 160) see it as a means of engaging the revolutionary potential of language characteristic of a minor literature. By employing it in a double-voiced discourse that places the protest in the mouths of the oppressed whilst at the same time creating the space for critical reflection these writers' use of the vernacular exposes the unjust social system underlying its use.

2.3 Displaced by Imprisonment

Another kind of displacement represented in the texts of black Afrikaans writers is that caused by political imprisonment. Afrikaans literature's most prolific prison writer is undoubtedly Breyten Breytenbach who wrote extensively on his own peculiar sense of displacement as a white Afrikaner during the seven years that he spent in jail as a political prisoner from 1975 to 1982.

Frank Anthony is a black Afrikaans poet who wrote about his experience as a political prisoner in the volume Robbeneiland my kruis my huis [Robben Island my Cross my Home] published in 1982 by the independent publisher Kampen. Anthony was sentenced to six years imprisonment after being found guilty on charges of terrorism in 1972 and served most of his sentence in the infamous island prison, Robben Island. His volume contains one long poem "Robbeneiland" [Robben Island] (pp. 1-67) as well as a number of shorter poems that deal with oppression and imprisonment.

The displacement suffered because of the colonisation of land seems to come to a logical culmination in the imprisonment of political dissenters against the neocolonial regime of apartheid. Ashcroft writes that a</p>

<pre> prison is the most concrete model possible of the coercive and surveillant power of a dominant authority, and when we observe the responses of political prisoners, particularly in South African

prison writing, we find a concentrated example of transformative

responses to imperial boundaries. (Ashcroft 2001: 168) </pre> <p>The discursive resistance that Anthony's poem "Robbeneiland" [Robben Island] offers to the political power that imprisons him operates on different levels. The mere fact that the poem is written in Afrikaans indicates an attempt to represent the experiential reality of oppression in the language often associated with the oppressing power. (13) The poem's combination of standard Afrikaans with the vernacular destabilises the authority imposed by standard forms of Afrikaans. The poem also diverges from a certain aesthetic standard by taking on a hybrid form that combines diverse styles, genres and themes. It combines a lyrical description with a series of factual footnotes in which certain elements in the poem are explained. It is at the same time a monologue addressed to the island as well as the mainland that seems to be unconscious of the plight of political prisoners (Anthony 1982: 13) and a narrative that follows the chronology of the prison experience. The poem starts with a description of the departure often prisoners for Robben Island, tells the story of their stay and concludes with their return to the mainland. Apart from that the poem establishes a link between the chained prisoners who travel on the lower deck of the ferry taking them to Robben Island and the history of slavery. It also rewrites history by providing facts about Robben Island in the footnotes, articulates political theory, evokes childhood memories and uses Afrikaans folk songs to describe the prison experience. The poem also inverts the usual opposition between the intimidated prisoner and the powerful state: the prisoners laugh at the displays of power masking the fear of the state (pp. 2, 60), at the anxious helicopter that hovers over the ferry transporting the political prisoners (p. 3) and at the fear of the warders with their guard dogs (pp. 11, 22). The volume is preceded by a poem dedicated to the poet's wife and the wives of all political prisoners, associating these women with freedom. It is noticeable that woman is sometimes used in the texts of these black Afrikaans authors as a metaphor for what has been lost (District Six) or what is longed for (freedom).

Resistance to the objectification of women by the white oppressors as well as brothers in the struggle comes from the poet Syda Essop, who has so far only published her poetry in the anthology I Qabane Labantu: Poetry in the Emergency (1989). Her autobiographical poem "Moeder van afrika" [Mother of Africa] (pp. 67-68) (14) focuses on yet another kind of displacement, that of a woman who came from "koloniale, oorloggeteisterde Indie" [colonial, warridden India] to South Africa as a teenage bride, entertaining high hopes for freedom and prosperity in Africa. In her struggle against the injustices of South Africa, she survived through sheer physical determination and the quality of humanity to become one of Africa's mothers. The poem "Sheila" (pp. 71-74) describes the lot of women who are not only oppressed by the white government but also by their husbands: "die regeringstelsel is soos die man / hulle vergeet / dat ons ook menslik is" [the government system is like men / they forget / that we are also human] (Essop 1989: 72). These poems constitute one of the few examples of a black Afrikaans writer commenting on the double oppression suffered by black women in South Africa.

2.4 Displaced by Exile

Another kind of displacement to affect the lives of many South Africans was political exile. Jones (2000: vii-viii) has called South African apartheid the "most spectacular" of the oppressive systems in Africa to generate exile, a state which he calls "disorientating but sometimes mentally productive" because it can intensify the "internal distancing of the individual from the environment that frequently produces art".

In this section I want to refer to the work of two black Afrikaans writers: the poet Julian de Wette who published two volumes whose titles allude to the state of exile, Die koning in die buiteland [The King Abroad] published in 1972 and Verban: Verbinne [Banned: Internalised/Insided] published in 1980 and the novelist E.K.M. Dido who published her first novel Die storie van Monica Peters [The Story of Monica Peters] after the political transition in 1995.

Although De Wette's poetry cannot be described as overtly political, it has been said that the sense of loneliness expressed in his poems clearly derives from the condition of exile (Gerwel 1985:19). The strongest manifestation of the displacement caused by exile in the first volume can be found in the title poem "Die koning in die buiteland" [The King Abroad] (p. 5). The narrator in this poem presents the reader with an ironical self-portrait in which he depicts himself as a "koning sonder volgelinge" [king without followers] who has fallen on hard times: his clothes are threadbare and do not protect him against the cold, his feet are bare, his heels are chapped and he sees his country in the distance. From a cold New York (the city in which De Wette lived for many years before returning to South Africa) this king can hear the sun laughing through Cape Town. This poem paints the picture of someone who experiences the state of exile as a feeling of cold, (15) impoverishment and intense longing for his own country.

The title of De Wette's second volume plays on similar-sounding Afrikaans words: the word "verban" (meaning "banned" or "exiled") is followed by "verbinne" (meaning "internalised" or more literally "becoming inside" or "insided"). In contrast with the previous title that emphasises the move to the "buiteland" (literally "the land on the outside"), this title refers to the experience of withdrawing into the self because of exile. This volume describes different kinds of exile and exiles. The poem "Wegloper, tuis" [Runaway, at Home] (pp. 21-22) contrasts the exile who longs for his country and feels lost in his new environment ("'n uitheemse woordesmous wat dowe ore aan 'n ketting inryg" [a foreign peddler of words stringing deaf ears on a chain]) with the exiles who leave South Africa for economic reasons and arrive at the doors of their new homelands with treasure chests on their backs. Another poem "New York, Mei 1979" [New York, May 1979] (pp. 38-39) addresses the white Afrikaans poet, Breyten Breytenbach, who lived in exile because of his marriage to a Vietnamese woman and later became a political prisoner in South Africa. The speaker confirms his loyalty to Breytenbach (who was in prison at the time that De Wette's poem was written) despite doubts about Breytenbach's loyalties to the struggle for freedom: "kom soos 'n trekvoel in die kouelente, kom / en red my vanjou makkers se deurmekaargepraat" [come like a migrant bird in the cold spring, come / and save me from the confusing talk of your comrades]. He calls Breytenbach his brother and exhorts him to go on imagining freedom inside his prison cell. The title poem in this volume, "Verban: Verbinne" [Exiled: Internalised/Insided] (p. 41), connects the theme of displacement by exile with the feeling of displacement caused by being neither white nor black. The speaker in the poem coins the neologism "bloedlasteraar", to refer to himself as a blasphemer against blood because he is of mixed origin: "ek is aan bloedlastering gewy, / verdiep in die vermenging van bloed, / verbinne" [I am devoted to blaspheming against blood, / engrossed in the mixing of blood, / internalised]. This poems speaks controversially of an identity that perceives itself as displaced by not being black, thus questioning the dismay that most black Afrikaans writers feel at seeing the "coloured writer" as "an ethnic thing apart, with its own racial norms and acceptances" (Rive 1985: 62-63). The way in which De Wette foregrounds his colouredness in opposition to blackness in this poem constitutes another one of the ambivalences in the discourse of black Afrikaans writers.

With the publication of Die storie van Monica Peters [The Story of Monica Peters] in 1996 E.K.M. Dido became the first black woman to publish a novel in Afrikaans. Dido is however quite emphatic that she wants to identify herself as coloured rather than black, telling of her discomfort at being called black and also of being severely criticised for using the term "coloured" (cf. Loots 2003). Hers is another case of a black Afrikaans writer feeling empowered and inspired by the post- 1994 dispensation to write creatively. Her first novel grew from a letter to a newspaper in which she protested against the notion that coloured people in the Western Cape sold out the province in the first democratic elections because they did not suffer as much as black people under apartheid (cf. Nieuwoudt 2000; Krog 2002). The novel was originally written in English but found its way to editor Annari van der Merwe at Kwela Books who asked her to translate it into Afrikaans. She rediscovered her own mother tongue in the process, adding new dimensions to literary Afrikaans by writing a "Xhosa Afrikaans" with an undertone of idiomatic Xhosa and a vocabulary extended by references to Xhosa (Krog 2002). This can be seen as another instance of a writer from a minor literature reterritorialising the language of a major literature (in this case the standard Afrikaans generally used in the Afrikaans literary canon).

Dido's novel tells of a series of displacements caused by the previous political dispensation in South Africa, culminating in exile. Her work differs from Julian de Wette's poetry in the sense that it looks back on political exile from a point in time after liberation, rather than writing from within the experience of exile as De Wette did in his first two volumes of poetry. The novel begins and concludes with the occasion on which Mandela addresses the nation after the first democratic election, an experience that inspires the main character Monica to tell her family members the story of her life. As a coloured girl growing up in a small town in the Transkei her life is disrupted by one displacement after the other. With the arrival of a white magistrate who has to enforce apartheid laws, Monica's parents are required to move to an area designated for coloured people (Dido 1996: 57), Monica is moved to a new school for coloured children (p. 51) and apartheid is enforced in the town's public amenties and shops (p. 59). When Monica wants to marry the white man Eric, the wedding ceremony has to take place in Swaziland and they are forced to live apart when they return to the town in Transkei. After living together clandestinely in Alexandra township in Johannesburg for four years, they go into exile in England where they spend twenty-five years before finally returning to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC. After their return to South Africa Eric and two of his comrades are murdered by anonymous gunmen.

Dido's novel is clearly an attempt to record South African history as experienced by a coloured woman. The desire to educate Afrikaans readers about the displacement caused by apartheid and reach a wide audience results in a novel that displays elements of the popular and the didactic (a feature of all her subsequent novels). The novel centres around the romance between Monica and Eric; the characterisation tends towards the stereotypical at certain points, the pre-apartheid spaces of Monica's youth are romanticised; the structural choice is for a straightforward chronological ordering of events; clear-cut conclusions rather than ambivalent portrayals prevail and certain situations in the plot are overtly used to educate readers about health care, history, social matters and moral values concerning family, loyalty, integrity and compassion for the suffering of others. The novel is pervaded by a strong social consciousness as well as a sense of optimism: the underlying sentiment seems to be that all obstacles can be overcome. As such, there is a distinct difference between Dido's rewriting of the history of displacement and the way in which black Afrikaans writers represented the same phenomenon before 1994. As in the case of A.H.M. Scholtz, who published his first novel after 1994, it is possible to project a feeling of hopeful pragmatism after political liberation has been achieved. In this sense their texts differ from the feelings of anger, resistance, even despondency reflected in the texts on displacement written by black Afrikaans authors before 1994.

2.5 Reversing Displacement

In the final instance, I want to refer to the writer Kirby van der Merwe's novel Klapperhaar slaap nie stil nie [One Cannot Sleep Peacefully on a Coir Mattress] that was published in 1999 and represents a reversal of earlier displacements. Together with Scholtz, Dido and S.P. Benjamin, Van der Merwe forms the core of a group of black Afrikaans authors who started publishing after 1994.

The central character in Van der Merwe's novel is Kinta Januarie, a young coloured lawyer, who tries to forget and suppress memories of her past but is forced to confront them when her father, from whom she has been estranged, dies. The novel tells how she displaces herself by moving out of the poverty-stricken spaces of her past to build a better life for herself in a move that reverses the forced removals of apartheid. She leaves the township where she grew up, goes to university, moves in with one of her white professors, makes a life for herself as a lawyer and buys the house in which they lived together when he returns to his overseas home. She keeps the house in pristine condition: clean, white (Van der Merwe 1999: 23), light and dry (p. 133) in an attempt to forget the overcrowding, dirt, neglect and abuse of her childhood when she lived in a one-roomed shack in someone's backyard with her mother, brother and sister (pp. 24-26). She compares her journey from the township on the Cape Flats to a white neighbourhood with crossing the line demarcated by a hedge of wild almond trees and a series of forts at the Cape in 1659 to keep the indigenous people from reclaiming the land they lost to settlement by the colonisers. (16) This line symbolically marked the enclosed space as the property of the coloniser and was intended to function as frontier between the savage and the civilised. When Kinta reflects on her reversal of the displacement caused by colonisation and the removals of apartheid, she is acutely aware of the emotional toll it exacted:</p> <pre> Hoe het sy die Vlakte ontsnap? Oor die heining gekom? Die laning van bitteramandels. Die aluinwaters van die Liesbeeck? Eenvoudig, dink  sy, ek het die toegangsfooi betaal. Een pond vleis, hie 'n druppel bloed meet of minder nie [How did she escape the Cape Flats? How did she get over the fence? Over the hedge of bitter almond trees? The alum waters of the Liesbeekrivier? Easily, she thinks, I paid the entrance fee. One pound of flesh, not a drop of blood more or less.] (Van der Merwe 1999: 79) </pre> <p>Kinta is forced to confront her relatives who stayed behind in the townships when her father is buried. She visits her sister Mymoena who lives with her gangster boyfriend Kat and attends the funeral presided over by her unscrupulous brother Abe. Each time that she returns to the spaces of her childhood, she is accompanied by one or both of the white men that she met at the deathbed of her father, displacing them albeit momentarily and metaphorically into spaces they would not have occupied as white men in the past. She takes her father's childhood friend Hans Brink to attend the funeral of her father in a church that he has only ever entered before to act against rioting students as a policeman during the apartheid years. She also takes the young doctor who attended to her father into the townships. She is quite cynical about his enthusiasm about what he perceives as coloured culture and the coloured way of life in the townships: "'n Week, 'n dag vir horn in die townships en hy't genoeg gehad vir die res van sy lewe. Dit sal hom regruk" [A week, a day in the townships and he will have had enough for the rest of his life. That will cure him] (p. 79), she thinks. She grudgingly accompanies him to the Cape Coon Carnival that takes place on the second of January of each year (pp. 78-79) because she resists the notion of a picturesque coloured culture that would enable him to stereotype and "other" coloureds. When he finally becomes the victim of assault and battery at the hands of gangsters in the townships, she takes him into her house to help him recuperate.

The novel ends with a description of Kinta and Gustav climbing Table Mountain; the final scene in the novel shows them sitting on a narrow ledge against the mountain as it is getting darker. Gustav does not know how they will be able to get off the ledge, but Kinta, who is an experienced mountaineer, seems sure that she will be able to lead the way. The white man Gustav is now the one who has been displaced and has to be led out of a dangerous situation by the coloured woman Kinta. How she will use her power is not made clear by the end of the novel. Van der Merwe's post-1994 novel represents an attempt to symbolically reverse certain displacements that marked South African history but not without pointing out the emotional complexities involved.

From this attempt to describe the way in which the black Afrikaans writers' relationship with space registers in their representations of a series of physical displacements certain features emerge. The history of displacement is written from the perspective of the displaced, Afrikaans is adapted through the use of different vernaculars, such as Kaaps so that its use undermines different hegemonic forces. Afrikaans is also used to represent a different experiential reality from that of white writers and there is a tendency to focus on and sometimes romanticise spaces associated with certain forms of displacement like District Six and Robben Island. Furthermore, it seems as if the transition to democracy empowered new voices to express themselves: their representations of displacement range from a rewriting of the past to attempts at reversal. Reading the representations of physical displacement against the background of the figurative displacement of black Afrikaans writers from the Afrikaans literary canon, even going so far as to see it as a minor literature in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari use the term has proved to be fruitful. This justifies reading these texts of black Afrikaans writers as a distinct group and enables one to foreground the disruptive features of these texts in relation to the Afrikaans literary canon.

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Small, Adam & Jansen, Chris 1973 Oos wes tuis bes Distrik Ses. Kaapstad/Pretoria: Human & Rousseau.

Smith, Julian F., Van Gensen, Alwyn & Willemse, Hein 1985 Swart Afrikaanse skrywers: Verslag van 'n simposium gehou by die Universiteit van Wes-Kaapland, Bellville op 26-27 April 1985. Bellville: UWK.

Sols, Loit 1998 My straat en anne praat-poems. Kaapstad: Kwela.

Van der Merwe, Annari 1996 Die ongewone geboorte van Vatmaar. Insig. Januarie, pp. 26-27.

Van der Merwe, Kirby 1999 Klapperhaar slaap nie stil nie. Kaapstad: Kwela.

Van Wyk, Steward 1999 Adam Small: Apartheid en skrywerskap. DLitt thesis, University of the Western Cape.

Wicomb, Zoe 1998 Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa. In: Attridge, Derek & Jolly, Rosemary (eds) Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, Democracy, 1970-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91-107.

Willemse, Hein 1987 The Black Afrikaans Writer: A Continuing Dichotomy. Triquarterly 69 Spring/Summer, pp. 237-247.

1995 Dialogie in die Afrikaanse letterkunde met toespitsing op geselekteerde swart Afrikaanse skrywers. DLitt thesis, University of the Western Cape.

1999 'n Inleiding tot buite-kanonieke Afrikaanse kulturele praktyke. In: Van Coller, H.P. (ed.) Perspektief en profiel. Deel 2. Pretoria: Van Schaik, pp. 3-20.

Willemse, Hein, Hatting, Marion, Van Wyk, Steward & Conradie, Pieter 1997 Die reis van Paternoster: 'n Verslag van die tweede swart Afrikaanse skrywersimposium gehou op Paternoster vanaf 29 September tot 1 Oktober 1995. Bellville: UWK.

Worden, Nigel [1994] 1995 The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation and Apartheid. 2nd edition. Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell.

* Extended version of a paper read at the ICLA conference, Hong Kong, August 2004.

Notes

(1.) Nethersole (1990: xvii) presents it as a "threefold dilemma" when she writes:</p> <pre> [A]t first, Afrikaans as language indigenous to Africa constitutes a minority language in relation to its European counterparts; secondly it is burdened with the heritage of an exclusive, racist, and oppressive nationalism, reminiscent of German after World War Two; while it is, thirdly, the only means providing approximately five million people of European and mixed descent with a cultural

identity. (Nethersole 1990: xvii) </pre> <p>(2.) Achmat Davids (1990: 3) contends that "Cape Afrikaans emerged from the creolized Dutch spoken by the slaves, the Khoe-Khoen, and the lower classes at the Cape at the beginning of the nineteenth century". He also refers to the fact that Cape Muslims devised an Afrikaans orthography in Arabic script in the nineteenth century: the first work in this Arabic Afrikaans tradition, Abu Bakr's Bayaan uddiin, was written in 1869 and published in 1877 (cf. Ponelis 1993: 73).

(3.) Examples of novels published by black Afrikaans writers before 1994 are S.V. Petersen's As die son ondergaan (1945), Arthur Fula's Johannie giet die beeld (1954) and Met erbarming, o Here (1957), Eddie Domingo's Okkies op die bree pad(1955) and Adam Small's Heidesee (1979). Small also wrote several theatre texts amongst which Kanna hy ko hystoe (1965) is regarded as one of the most important ever written in Afrikaans.

(4.) The issues occupying black Afrikaans writers were discussed at two conferences held in 1985 and 1995 respectively, resulting in two volumes of essays: Swart Afrikaanse skrywers (edited by Smith, Van Gensen & Willemse 1985) and Die reis na Paternoster (edited by Willemse, Hattingh, Van Wyk & Conradie 1997).

(5.) All translations into English from the Afrikaans are my own, unless stated otherwise.

(6.) See the following lines from the poem "Tulbagh":</p> <pre>

Ons wat van gorra grawe weet / ooit in die stof verstik? / Kan skerpioene en miere eet/ en bessies tussen dorings pluk. [We who know

how to dig for water / ever suffocate in the dust? / We can eat

scorpions and ants / and pick berries amongst thorns.] (Philander 1960: 5) </pre> <p>(7.) See the following lines from the poem "Tulbagh":</p>

<pre> Vorentoe by vertrapte soutpanne / sal julle verlang na oogbanke gras // in Tulbagh waar geutlangs / ou Winterhoek sy strome stort.

[Further inland at the trampled salt-pans / you will long for the

banks of grass // In Tulbagh where along funnels / the streams of

old Winterhoek plunge.] (Philander 1960: 5) </pre> <p>(8.) The website of Kwela Books says:</p> <pre> Kwela streef daarna om 'n bree lees- en boekkultuur in Suid-Afrika te vestig en om vats plaaslike skryftalent te help ontwikkel. Kwela huisves veral skrywers wat nie sommer by die gevestigde uitgewers tuis voel nie. [Kwela seeks to establish a broad reading and book culture in South Africa and to help develop local writing talent. Kwela especially accommodates those writers who do not easily feel at home with the established publishing houses.] (www.nb.co.za/Kwela) </pre> <p>(9.) Vatmaar won several literary prizes in Afrikaans and translations of the novel into Dutch, English and German were well received. The novel was also adapted for the stage.

(10.) Van Wyk (1999: 68-101) writes extensively about the Christian elements in Small's work as well as his use of satire.

(11.) See "Ons het lankal in plekke / soes Windemere / al ons verlangens / afgaleer // o Here djy kan maar lyster / na ons lied / sonner worry, ons is lankal / verby vadriet." [We have long since learned to disregard / all our yearnings / in places like Windermere//o Lord you can listen / to our song / without worrying, we are long/past sorrow.] (Small [1962]1973: 21)

(12.) No page numbers are given in this volume.

(13.) Gerwel (1985: 20) also comments on this when he writes: "Hiermee het Anthony 'n outentieke swart ervaring onder woorde gebring in Afrikaans." [With this Anthony put an authentic black experience into words in Afrikaans.]

(14.) According to information provided by the poet the poem refers to her grandmother.

(15.) As is often the case in literature produced by exiles who leave South Africa to live in the Northern Hemisphere the opposition between (Northern) cold and (Southern) heat, (Northern) dark and (Southern) light plays an important role. (In Afrikaans literature one finds examples of this opposition in the works of Peter Blum, N.P. van Wyk Louw, Breyten Breytenbach and Barend Toerien.)

(16.) In 1659 and 1660 a hedge of wild almond trees was planted and a series of forts with Dutch names like "Keert de koe" [Stop the Cow], "Houd de bul" [Hold the Bull"], "Kijckuijt" [Be on the Lookout] and "Ruiterwacht" [Horseguard] was built (Boeseken 1980: 34).