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Even though Namibia was never a British colony, English was chosen by the new government at the time of independence in 1990 as the only official language of the country and the main or sole medium of instruction in schools. The main focus of this article is to demonstrate the detrimental effect that education in an unfamiliar language is having on the development of a reading culture among Namibian youth. This situation is contributing to the neglect and deterioration of the 12 other Namibian languages. The discussion includes a description of the Namibian language scene and the consequences of the language policy on the publishing of multilingual children's books in Namibia, which again jeopardises the incentives and creativity of Namibian children's book authors and illustrators. A statistical analysis of books published for Namibian children for the period 1906-2011 is presented, albeit not a comprehensive one. Lastly, a brief overview of the Namibian Children's Book Award and the publishing projects of a non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Namibian Children's Book Forum (NCBF), is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article submits that self-reclamation in Zoë Wicomb's short-story cycle, “You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town” and Other Stories, is revealed through storytelling. “Ritual enactment”, the phrase that bell hooks uses to depict the kind of narrative that calls to mind the mediation of the images of black depersonalisation especially as it pertains to the corporal body, is used in this discussion to explore memory as a site of resistance. The argument is that narration in these stories invents a self that authenticates blackness via discursive and self-dialogised practices, and that these are evident also in a spectrum of voices in black social contexts. Throughout this discussion, memory is shown to be also acknowledging and navigating complicity in that which is being critiqued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By definition, disengaged literary exegesis, vigorously pursued since the advent of Anglo-American New Criticism (and avidly recycled in various guises in the aftermath of the deconstructive spin), retreats from the prospect of integrating “art” and “life” (to revert to an older, belletristic idiom). It retreats, too, from the prospect of investing the discipline of literary studies with existential purpose or propensity. Although recent orientations such as ethnic and embodiment studies are routinely interfused with standard, often Levinasian, animadversions concerning moral and cultural circumstances and the amelioration of socio-political ills, the professional pursuit of interpretative fecundity compels their exponents to sorn upon the artefact and to treat the activity of reading ontolophagously - as an opportunity to infiltrate shopworn “theories” and viscid banalities into tedious and wearisome recensions of the literary text. The article proposes an exegetical model which has its source in a desire to rediscover the paradoxes, perplexities, and polarities - the unaccountable amalgam of dispossession, intimacy, and spectatorship - inherent in the act of reading. Beyond characterisation, beyond narrative progression, beyond action and reaction, even beyond the artifice of syntax and semantics, the reader is preoccupied with the singularity of consciousness as it seeks to organise experience. The article explores some of the ways in which consciousness is represented to consciousness, and some of the ways in which readers “model” consciousness in order to make it available to itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1970s and 80s witnessed a vigorous, often polemical debate in the South African literary field between those dubbed “instrumental” (or political) critics and those of “art” persuasion. The end of apartheid promised a new phase of discussion. What has happened, however, is not so much a turn to artistic issues, but a turn to continental philosophers (Derrida, Foucault, Levinas) as theorists of an ethical respect for and responsibility to “otherness”. At the centre of such critical attention has been the novelist, J.M. Coetzee. The “case of Coetzee” provokes consideration of what, by the end of the 1990s, was in danger of becoming a new orthodoxy, in which the abstract language of theory is imported onto the text, often erasing the very character that grants the literary work its experiential distinctiveness. The article asks: is it not time to go beyond Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), to seek a new critical project for the new millennium? Perhaps Coetzee himself points a way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the celebration in 2008 of the 125th anniversary of the first publication of Olive Schreiner's novel, The Story of an African Farm, in 1873, the question of reliability of the text came up once again for review. This article accounts for the circumstances of the first printing in London with an inexperienced author as proofreader, without any existing standardisation or other lexical references to non-British usages particularly proto-Afrikaans, to consult, and the prevailing London publishing norms in control. Subsequent editions with numerous corrections by her hand, as well as by later editors, are mentioned, while the quest to establish a definitive edition is outlined, now that English South African usages incorporate many fringe language examples which have since become nativised into common usage. The article suggests that lax proofreading, on the one hand, together with scantily informed metropolitan standards of language outreach, on the other, have led to unfortunate errors being perpetuated, even in numerous scholarly spin-offs, despite the attempts of previous scholars to standardise the text to conform to present-day professional norms and conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2006), which was translated from the Afrikaans into English by Michiel Heyns, examines the relationship between a dying white woman and her Coloured carer. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that the themes of (post)colonialism, race relations and gender dynamics are being explored; however, the means through which they are conveyed are through the complicated, distressing and moving relationship between the two protagonists, which exemplifies the relationship between white Afrikaners in particular (and by extension whites generally in South Africa) and Coloureds in particular (and by extension the racial other). Religion is a crucial aspect of the changing dynamics between these two representative characters. In this paper I examine the striking parallels between the novel and the Book of Ruth, particularly with regard to the relationship between the two female protagonists. I analyse van Niekerk's critique of supremacist religion, especially during apartheid, and her representation of the necessity for ruth, or compassion, in contemporary South Africa. I employ concepts raised by a number of feminist postcolonialist scholars of theology to illustrate the radical nature of van Niekerk's representation of religion and spirituality in the novel. In particular, I examine the implications of applying Marcella Althaus-Reid's controversial concept of the Bi/Christ to the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlene van Niekerk's Agaat (2004) can be read as a postcolonial farm novel which pays particular attention to the role of women, the representation of Coloured farm workers as well as issues relevant to landownership in South Africa. In Agaat the question of landownership is foregrounded when Agaat, a coloured woman, becomes the owner of the farm Grootmoedersdrift and when Jakkie, the only son of the white woman farmer Milla de Wet, returns to Canada to resume his work in ethnomusicology. Agaat presents a problematisation of the influence wielded by landownership on the identity of the farmer, as Milla, who dearly loves her farm, also claims the farm to achieve her emancipatory objectives as a woman. Furthermore, Jakkie's willing relinquishment of his claim to landownership contributes towards a problematisation of the identity formation of the Afrikaner farmer and his/her descendants in the farm novel. In contrast with the situation in the older farm novel, for Jakkie, landownership is no longer a defining identity marker. This article on landownership and, particularly, the relation between landownership and the identities of both Milla and Jakkie de Wet in Agaat, also assesses the contribution of Marlene van Niekerk's novel to the development of the Afrikaans farm novel within a postcolonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys South African prose in English and Afrikaans published after 1994. With the first democratic elections a new era began. The political and social changes are obviously reflected in the prose that was written in the previous decade. There are striking thematic parallels between the literary works in English and Afrikaans. The demise of apartheid led to a euphoric mood but very soon a new realism set in. A number of works appeared in which history was rewritten. Not only the immediate apartheid past but also the earlier history of South Africa is highlighted. The past is demythologised and the previously hidden sides of history are exposed. Moreover a lot of attention is paid to the new South Africa. The old parameters are no longer valid. The whites have lost their political power. This realisation often leads to a crisis of identity. New rulers also introduce new customs. The changes which have taken place are not always regarded as improvements. And then there are all the other seemingly insoluble problems such as the crime wave and the aids epidemic. But these problems are sometimes seen as catalysts for change as they can bring the races closer together. Both in English and in Afrikaans prose the hope is expressed that the transformation process will ultimately lead to a better South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay teases out the paradoxes inherent in competing notions of (1) authorial "ownership" of a text and of its modes of signification in acts of translation, (2) the claims upon that text by a translator, and (3) the senses in which imaginative texts are "co-owned" by readers, specialists, critics, teachers, reviewers and editors. Based on anecdotal evidence -- in this instance, an incomplete case-history of translating the Afrikaans novel Triomf into English -- the essay builds an argument about the nature of translation in more general terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a fairy tale by Godfried Bomans, "De rijke bramenplukker", and the aim is to show how elements from fairy tales can address current environmental values in society. The writer discusses relevant intertexts and the context of the author, as well as the use of fairy tales as literary texts for the moral education of adolescents. The main argument is that literature can add to the sensitising of cultural (environmental) and aesthetic values in social contexts and therefore these types of fairy tales can form part of the secondary school curriculum, especially with the emphasis of the approach in the new outcomes-based education on the development of values and responsible citizenship. The hidden environmental perspective in the fairy tale is explored as a possibility for the experience of values in the teaching of Afrikaans literature. This text is useful in the Senior Phase (Grades 7-9) where fairy tales as well as Dutch literary texts may be prescribed for learners of Afrikaans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]