The state of South African literary criticism

After decades of disparagement from conservative and thoroughly colonial literature departments, African literary studies are slowly beginning to gain momentum. The academic barometer registers a few African literature courses being introduced, albeit grudgingly, more journals appearing and seminars taking place. Yet despite this slowly accelerating interest, the results of the critical enquiry are often singularly lacklustre. Instead of a dynamic critical approach, as one would expect from a 'new' discipline, we face a critical malaise. Article after article conspicuously fails to elucidate any meaningful aspect of African literature, past and present. Writers continuously resort to tired and hackneyed formulations that should by all rational standards have been obsolete years ago. Despite having come under heavy and concerted attack, the phantoms of our peculiar brand of prac. crit.1 still go strong universality, felt life a naive empiricism and the use of generally shoddy analytical concepts that are incapable of articulating or acknowledging their own premises.2 In addition, this type of criticism resorts to making definitive judgements and pronouncements in a field that has not by any stretch of the imagination been fully explored. Together the corpus of much contemporary African literary criticism reads like a sorry battology. Tim Couzens puts the point bluntly: South African literary criticism is in a state of original ignorance. The results, he says, are tragic. Everyday we are losing a little of our literary history and everyday we are failing to educate our audience a little more.3 Despite the yawning abysses that have yet to be researched in the history of African literature, many critics are happy to slot into preconceived and erroneous ideas about African literature, its genesis and development. To them there is already an established 'tradition' that is uncritically embraced as unproblematic and pristinely normative. It looks something like this. The kick-off date is about 1830 with Thomas Pringle, followed by a silence of fifty years. Next comes Olive Schreiner, then another leap to the 1920s with Millin, Plomer, van der Post and Campbell. Next in this peculiar pageant is Bosman, who acts as a transitional figure to slide us into the 50s and 60s with Paton, Cope, Jacobson and Gordimer. The project is then presumably suitably rounded off by reference to a few contemporary writers. And for many people this would be a perfectly adequate and satisfying cross section of African literature.4 But quite obviously it is not. On the most simple level, this 'tradition' is hopelessly selective. It excludes, for example, all pre-nineteenth-century writing, the most notable exception being oral literature. It ignores all working class literature, both African and Afrikaans, and it shuns large chunks of white popular literature with vehemence. In