Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

The concerns and form of the novel in southern Africa have been determined largely by the region's cultural and social politics: for autochthonous communities as for settlers (mostly from Europe), writing served to mediate experiences of modernity, alienation, and ideological interpellation. Permanent European settlement began with the establishment by the Dutch East India Company of a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652; the diary of the settlement's first commander, Jan van Rie-beeck, is often cited as the progenitor of an Afrikaans literary tradition in South Africa. Little creative writing was produced until the early nineteenth century, by which time the erstwhile Dutch settlement had expanded and come under British control (1795–1802, and from 1806): South Africa achieved measures of independence in 1910 and 1930, and became a white minority-ruled republic in 1961 and a multiracial democracy in 1994. Elsewhere in the region, British, Portuguese, and German colonial expansion ensured that the whole of southern Africa was directly or indirectly ruled by European powers, or by self-governing minorities of European descent, by the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, southern Africa attracted ethnographers, scientists, and missionaries. The latter maybe credited with the spread of printing and literacy and the development of orthographies for ... log in or subscribe to read full text