Southern Africa

Overview

Apartheid, instituted in 1948 and dismantled in 1991, determined forty years of publishing: the books of Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink were banned at home, those of Alex La Guma and Bessie Head written in exile, and the Publications Control Board censored thousands of titles. Before that, the notebooks of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, filled between 1870 and 1884 with ǀxam storytellers imprisoned in Cape Town, preserved the only sustained record of a now extinct language. Zimbabwe and Namibia have their own literature of the independence war.

What circulates

Johannesburg and Cape Town concentrate publishing, in English and Afrikaans, and the Nguni and Sotho languages remain confined to school and religious books despite their millions of speakers. Exiles published in London and Ibadan, and their books came home clandestinely. Banned books circulated under the counter and through public readings.

Limits of this grouping

Five countries for an area that South Africa dominates through its publishing: Botswana, Lesotho and Namibia have fewer titles published in a century than Cape Town in a year. The division also leaves aside Mozambique and Angola, Lusophone, whose history is nonetheless bound to the region's.

Works cited

• TaleSpecimens of Bushman FolkloreWilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd · 1911A San language, ǀxam, recorded in the 1870s from prisoners entrusted to two scholars in Cape Town; it is now extinct.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAn African TragedyR. R. R. Dhlomo · 1928The city and its temptations seen by a young Zulu writer trained in the mission schools, at the end of the 1920s.Literature
• CinemaJitMichael Raeburn · 1990A comedy set to the rhythm of jit music, in which a boy must earn the bride price for his beloved under the eye of an ancestral spirit.Cinema