HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOUTH AFRICAN WRITERS

Human Rights Month is commemorated in March to keep South Africans reminded of the sacrifices that accompanied the struggle for the attainment of democracy in the country, marked by Nelson Mandela’s electoral victory in 1994. Under apartheid, the white minority held almost all political offices in South Africa, with other races underrepresented. While the struggle for freedom was becoming heated up, making news headlines across the globe – exiles, deaths, imprisonments, and other punitive measures to keep freedom movements suppressed and unheard, South African writers took the side of the oppressed, giving people the language to thoroughly engage with the political situation in South Africa, in all manifestations of it.

Africa as a continent has produced writers and literary prophets from its struggles, from the first generation writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sembene Ousmane. Having survived the horror of colonization that lasted until the 1960s, South Africa has even more faces to display because of the added tragedy of apartheid which lasted until the 1990s. Human Rights struggle in the literary world in Africa is not close to the finish. More stories are being told. Every year we see newer voices on the South African literary scene whose works engage in all that concerns human rights, from the Feesmustfall campaign to women’s rights and LGBTQ-related issues.  Meanwhile, we celebrate these persons for mirroring the South African society through the literary arts.

ACHMAT DANGOR

A writer, poet and political activist, he ascended to become a celebrated visionary for human rights and social justice in South Africa. He is the founding executive director of Kagiso trust where he worked alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the freedom fight. During apartheid South Africa he co-founded Black Thoughts together with thirteen other writers. Black Thoughts was aimed at combatting the rigorous and oppressive education system forced upon black children in black schools by the apartheid government. Children were forced to learn in Afrikaans language in the townships, and overt selectiveness and censorship was imposed on what was made available for their reading. Black Thoughts went ahead and did public readings in black communities (churches and schools) until they were banned by the apartheid government. His novel Kafka’s Curse won the Herman Charlse Bosman Prize. In 2015 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by South African Literary Awards. His latest Novel is Dikeldi.

ANDRE BRINK

Born in 1935, Brink is known as a critic of apartheid in South Africa. An academic, novelist and poet, he was best known for his book, A Dry White Season published in 1979 and was later made into a film. He won the CNA award for literature. He was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. He is also the author of The Other Side of Silence which tackles the ugly harm of colonialism.He calls it the most painful novel he ever wrote. True to the realities of post-apartheid South Africa he pointed in 2012 that South Africa was “still at a very difficult stage, trying to battle through”. Writing about Nelson Mandela in his piece, A Letter to Madiba published in the New Yorker he says, “What you did achieve, Madiba, was to highlight the human dimensions of interaction with the world, rather than to fashion yourself as Mr. Fix-all, or Mr. Know-All”. The same can be said about Andre Brink. Until his death on board a flight to Cape Town in 2015 he actively promulgated the value of truth and freedom in South Africa.

BESSIE HEAD

She was born on 6^th July 1937 and grew up in an Anglican mission orphanage. Her career as a journalist began in 1959 and achieved her popularity as a writer through her works on Drum Magazine. She moved to Cape Town in 1960 and joined a group of anti-apartheid activists. It was in Cape Town she wrote her first novel which would be published posthumously. The political turbulence at the time led to the end of her marriage with Harold Head who was the first black reporter for The Evening Post. He fled to England, she fled to Botswana where she suffered a great deal of rejection. Much of her writings after losing her teaching job in Botswana drew from her experiences in South Africa, her first home. She is the author of When Rainclouds Gather, Maru, A Question of Power which explores her mental health at the time of living as a vulnerable, poor refugee. She died of hepatitis at the age of 49 with some writing projects unfinished.

BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

Breyten was born on 16^th September 1939 in the Cape. He left South Africa in 1960 following his opposition to apartheid. His first published work is The Iron Cow Must Sweat (1964). On his return to South Africa in 1975 he was arrested and charged with treason, sentenced to nine years in prison. He kept writing while in jail, his memoir written in jail is titled Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. He moved to France in 1982 and gained French Citizenship. In April 1986 he won the Rapport’s Major Literature Prize. His novel, Memory of Dust and Snow (1989) does serious analysis of anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. He has taught creative writing at the Goree Instituter in Dakar, Senegal, the University of New York, and the University of Cape Town.

DAMON GALGUT

He was only six when he fell ill with cancer, and he was only seventeen when he wrote his first book and since then has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize. In 2011 Galgut, among other writers, boycotted a book fair in Sri Lanka because of concerns over the country’s human rights record. It was thought inappropriate to celebrate literature in a country where dissident voices were being victimized by the government. Although his work is criticized by South African reviewers for refusing to particularly engage with the political climate at the time, his book titled The Good Doctor attempts throwing light on the difficulties apartheid caused in its wake.  

ES’KIA MPHAHLELE

He is often referred to as the father of African humanism. Ezekiel Mphahlele was born on 17^th December 1919 and raised in Pretoria. Down Second Avenue, a very famous South African classic, was written by him. It brings together the story of a young man’s maturation with piercing social censure of the conditions imposed upon black South Africans by apartheid. He went into voluntary exile to Nigeria in 1957. Sometime later he would work as director of the African program at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. Alongside Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier he was coeditor of Black Orpheus (a literary periodical) from 1960-1964 published in Ibadan, Nigeria. He returned to South Africa in 1977. He is the author of The Wanderers (1971) and Chirundu (1979), and many other writings.

J.M. COETZEE

Coetzee was born on 9^th February 1940 in Cape Town. He began writing fiction in 1969, his first book being Dusklands published in 1974. His other works include In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Disgrace (1999) among other fictionalized memoirs and lectures. He is a recipient of the Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature. His most popular novel, Disgrace, is a huge platform that discusses the limitation of human rights as tools for approaching social justice. It also critics the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s experiment in human rights: its move of unraveling accounts of violation and holding them up for public scrutiny. He tackles the “philosophical and practical wisdom of using the language of rights either to condemn wrongdoing or to instigate sociopolitical recovery”. Alongside Nadine Gordimer, Coetzee is often seen today as the face of South African literature.

LEWI NKOSI

Lewis Nkosi spent the most of his adult life in exile due to the restrictions forced on him because of his writings. Born on 5^th December 1936 in Chesterville, Durban, Nkosi would later be known as a social critic, journalist and broadcaster. Most of his essays were published in Home and Exile which would become a reliable source for students of African Literature. In 1964 his drama, The Rythm of Violence visits the theme of racism. His first novel, Mating Birds, brought Nkosi to the limelight because of its brilliant examination of interracial affairs.He died on 5th September 2010.

NADINE GORDIMER

Alongside J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer is a long-lasting, first-page face on South African literary scene. Her writings have rigorously engaged with issues of morality and race, and casts a beaming, expository light on apartheid South Africa, a regime that banned two of her books: July’s People and Burger’s Daughter. She was one of Nelson Mandela’s advisers on his 1964 defense speech at the trial that led to his conviction. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. White though she is, her voice in the literary scene has unequivocally rejected all systems of racial prejudice and oppression. He is often visiting with a special sensibility, the subtle and unsubtle manifestations of racial privilege. Her collection of short stories A Soldier’s Embrace show the often unseen layers of manifestations of black humiliation and white privilege. She lives in Johannesburg.

ZAKES MDA

Novelist, poet and playwright, Mda was born in the Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1948. As a child he faced a horrifying event of repeated interrogation by the apartheid police about his father, a founding member of the African National Congress Youth League. Soon his family was exiled to Lesotho. He began the South African AIDS Multimedia Trust in 1994 and has since been a notable figure in HIV and AIDS activism in South Africa. His Drama, We Shall Sing for the Fatherland as well as other plays challenge corruption in government. Told from a black perspective, Zakes Mda’s novels explore with so much nuance, the bleak realities of post-apartheid South Africa. He has won the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Sunday Times Literary Prize, and the M-Net Prize. Some of his works include The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (2013), Dead End (1979), and The Nun’s Romantic Story (1991).

References:

Channel 24

Cornell Scholarship Online: Fiction of Dignity

SA History Online

Stellenbosch Writers

The British Encyclopedia

Wikepedia