By Humairaa Mayet
Editedby Imaan Moosa
Like many others, literature is seen as a man’s game. South African women, however, have not seen it this way. Through the various tumultuous historical periods the country has faced, women have been at the forefront of narrating their experiences.
South Africa has faced extreme strife – over the years, colonialism and imperialism indeterminably altered the landscape of the country. Today, we know far more about the events which took place centuries ago because of the literary works that paint vivid pictures for us. Many of these were penned by women who ultimately paved the way for South African women who are taking the literary world by storm today.
The system of apartheid, and even the systems which predated apartheid, were cruel and unkind. They positioned black people and other people of colour as inferior to their white counterparts. They positioned women as inferior to men, and black women as the most inferior of all the groups in South Africa. Remnants of these systems can still be found in contemporary South African society. Many people of colour and women have sought to stamp them out using myriad techniques and methods, literature notwithstanding.
Many South African women, seeing no other option, took to – and still are taking – to writing, whether it be poetry or prose or even non-fiction. Not only is writing cathartic, it is also an expressive way to tell a story and get your point across when society refuses to listen to the words coming out of your mouth.
Stories are central to emancipation, regardless of whether they are told in a fictional or factual manner. Women, for centuries, have used stories to liberate themselves from the existing, male-dominated order which often seeks to silence them.
South African women have played an essential role in the world of literature and continue to do so today. They have brought compelling and riveting narratives to the landscape of South African literature and have enriched it beyond its wildest dreams.
Olive Schreiner
Image: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Author of Story of an African Farm, Olive Schreiner was the first woman to publish a work of fiction in South Africa in 1883. Her novel was considered to be the founding text of South African literature. It is said to portray white South African life in the hinterland in a realistic manner that also includes elements of fiction without diminishing the authenticity of the narration.
In 1897, Schreiner published Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland, another novel. Years later, she shifted from writing novels to focusing on writing more polemical works, such as Women and Labour which was published in 1911. It was seen as one of the first feminist texts which paved the way for similar writers in the Union of South Africa.
The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone shall receive a less recompense’, she said, ‘is the nearest approach to a willful and unqualified ‘wrong’ in the whole relation of woman to society today.
Helen Nontando Jabavu
Image: Amazwi Virtual Exhibitions
A writer and journalist, Helen Nontando Jabavu – better known as Noni Jabavu – pursued a successful literary career and made history as the first black woman in South Africa to publish an autobiography. She was born in South Africa and educated in Britain where she worked for some time before returning home.
She published two memoirs; Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People. Both of her novels were seen as revolutionary and inspirational, not only in South Africa but around the world. Jabavu wrote from the perspective of a black woman under the apartheid regime in the mid-twentieth century, which was extremely rare at the time.
One only has to read her two books (Drawn in Colour and The Ochre People) to realise just how skilled she was as a memoirist. Her journalistic column editorials demonstrate a reflective style that must have been unusual for her times. While interviewing Wally Serote who was living in Botswana during the same time as Noni, I learned something that confirmed my initial thoughts on her. `Men, she said, did not know how to relate to her (Noni)’. She was a woman living far ahead of our times - Makhosazana Xaba
Miriam Tlali
Image: New Frame
The first black woman to write a novel in English in South Africa, Miriam Tlali worked as a clerk before she began writing. She drew inspiration from her job for her first novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, which was semi-autobiographical and received rave reviews. Under the apartheid regime, much of what she wrote was seen as controversial. This resulted in some of her writings being censored and banned by the government.
Tlali’s novel, Amandla, which she wrote about the 1976 uprising in South Africa was arguably one of her most influential works. Never before had any South African written about their experience under the repressive government in such a manner. While Tlali’s other books written about apartheid from a personal perspective, Amandla was written from a perspective that was far more political. This book, too, was banned, but in the aftermath of apartheid, rose to fame in South Africa and across the globe.
You know, in Sophiatown we had very few educated Africans, but they were so broad in their reading. They all had books in their pockets. My husband was one of them. I don't think I would have stayed very long with him if he were different.
Nadine Gordimer
Image: Nobel Prize
Nadine Gordimer, a woman who made South African literature what it is today. Her political activism could often be detected in her publications and because of this, much of her work was banned by the apartheid government. Gordimer’s novels, Burger’s Daughter and July’s People, were her most famous works. They grappled with issues of morality under apartheid.
She was inspired by her surroundings at a very young age and wrote her first short story when she was just 15-years-old. Over the course of her life, she wrote for a multitude of local and international publications. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Today, Gordimer’s works are still extremely influential and she is remembered as the writer who offered Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 speech which led to him being sentenced to prison for life.
What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Lauretta Ngcobo
Image: The Journalist
Activist, novelist and essayist, Lauretta Ngcobo was exiled from South Africa during apartheid and spent time in Swaziland, Zambia and England. Much of her work confronted the reality of being a black woman under a regime which posited black women as the most inferior of all human beings. This led to her work making a large impact in South Africa and elsewhere, but also caused controversy and a stir.
Ngcobo received the Lifetime Achievement Literary Award of the South African Literary Awards. Her novels And They Didn’t Die and Cross of Gold was widely read and critically acclaimed. She wrote while in exile and had her essays published in the various countries in which she resided. Once the apartheid system collapsed, she returned to South Africa and continued to write.
From the day she arrived at her husband's home, no one called her by her name. The women are experts at waiting – for husbands, for rain, for unborn children.
These five women, among many, many others, shaped South African literature. Their legacy will continue to stain the pages of books penned by South African women today and their spirits will live on in the literary world.
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