Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner  (1855-1920)

South African novelist and political activist most famous for her book The Story of an African Farm (1883). Schreiner was a pioneer in her treatment of women in her fiction and made many perceptive observations on the political future of South Africa, particularly the situation of blacks under apartheid. Born Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner in Wittebergen, South Africa (then Cape Colony), she had no formal education but was taught at home by her mother. She began writing two of her novels while supporting herself as a governess from 1874 to 1881, after which she went to England, hoping to study. The Story of an African Farm was published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron while Schreiner was in England. The story of a young girl growing up on a farm in the grasslands of southern Africa, trying to attain her independence in the face of a rigid, repressive society, the book met with immediate success. In England Schreiner came to be accepted by literary and political circles and became a supporter of women's rights. She was a friend of Cecil Rhodes, a British statesman and major proponent for British rule in southern Africa, but parted company with him for political reasons. Schreiner caused controversy in relation to Rhodes's activities with her book Trooper Halkett of Mashonaland (1897), which criticized the way Rhodesia (which became Zimbabwe in 1980) was colonized. She returned to South Africa in 1899 and worked on behalf of the Boers, a local, white Afrikaner group that refused to live under British rule, during the Boer War (1899-1902). Schreiner also met and married a politician, Samuel Cronwright—he changed his name to Cronwright-Schreiner—and they both worked for a variety of political causes. In 1911 she wrote Women and Labour, a feminist novel criticizing the relations between men and women. Schreiner spent her last years in England, separated from her husband, but returned to South Africa in 1920 shortly before she died. Her other novels, both with feminist themes, are From Man to Man (1927) and Undine (1929). They were published posthumously.

Sir Laurens Van der Post

Sir Laurens Van der Post (1906-1996)

South African writer, best known for his books of personal reflection on travel and anthropology, and whose prose is noted for its striking imagery and minute observation. Born in Philippolis, Van der Post was raised on a working ranch and educated at Grey College in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In 1925, with two other South African writers, Roy Campbell and William Plomer, he helped start the magazine Voorslag, which was strongly opposed to the South African apartheid government. Due to his involvement with the periodical, Van der Post was forced to leave South Africa and so traveled to Japan, where he wrote his first novel, In a Province (1934), an early indictment of South African racism. From 1939 to 1946 Van der Post served with the British army during World War II (1939-1945); he spent three years (1943-1946) in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, an experience on which he based his books The Seed and the Sower (1963; filmed as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in 1983), The Night of the New Moon (1970), and Portrait of Japan (1968).     

Van der Post's early exposure to San myths led to a lifelong fascination with this ethnic group of the Kalahari Desert of northern South Africa, whose traditional way of life Van der Post has idealized in his writings as an intuitively spiritual state of perfect harmony with the natural environment. His works on San culture, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), A Mantis Carol (1975), and Testament to the Bushman (with Jane Taylor, 1984), are probably his best known books.  Other books by Van der Post include Venture to the Interior (1952), Flamingo Feather (1955), Jung and the Story of Our Time (1976), Yet Being Someone Other (1982), A Walk with a White Bushman (with Jean-Marc Pottiez, 1986), About Blady (1991), and Feather Fall: An Anthology (edited by Jean-Marc Pottiez, 1994). Van der Post was knighted by the British government in 1981.

Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard (1932- )

African Writing in English

South African playwright, director, and actor, whose works often focus on South African politics. By portraying the conflict between characters from different backgrounds, Fugard's plays explore racism and repression—of apartheid (a system of racial segregation formerly adhered to in South Africa) in particular and of civilization in general—and celebrate the strength of the human spirit.

Born Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard in Middleburg, Fugard was educated at the University of Cape Town and began working in theater in the late 1950s. In 1959 his experimental theater group in Port Elizabeth produced his first play No Good Friday. International recognition came with the production of The Blood Knot (1961), which with Hello and Goodbye (1965) and Boesman and Lena (1969) formed a trilogy of plays focusing on family relationships in Port Elizabeth. Fugard cowrote Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1973) with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. His other plays include A Lesson from Aloes (1978), Master Harold ... and the Boys (1982), The Road to Mecca (1984), My Children, My Africa! (1988), Playland (1992), and Valley Song (1995).

With the ending of apartheid in the early 1990s, Fugard’s writing became less specifically political. The Captain’s Tiger (1999) is based on Fugard’s experience serving as a steamer ship captain’s assistant in the mid-1950s. Many of Fugard’s works have been produced in theaters worldwide and have received critical acclaim. Fugard wrote about his work in the theater in Notebooks 1960-1977 (1984); he wrote about his personal life in Cousins: A Memoir (1997).

Athol Fugard (1932- )

African Writing in English

International Conference on Latest Trends in English Studies and Research April, 2015

International Conference
on
Latest Trends in English Studies and Research
21 April, 2015
Sadguru Gadage Maharaj College, Karad
Maharashra, India

 International Conference on Latest Trends in English Studies and Research April, 2015

International Conference on Latest Trends in English Studies and Research April, 2015

Bessie Head

Bessie Head (1937-1986)

African Writing in English

South African writer, whose works express the struggles for individual identity within a community and in the face of a variety of difficult social conditions.Head is best known for her novel A Question of Power (1973), the first part of which is autobiographical. The novel describes the experiences of its protagonist, Elizabeth, a native of South Africa who lives alone in Botswana. The book follows Elizabeth's attempts to make sense of the world around her, a world that poses itself as rational, despite apartheid and masculine dominance. The book's themes include madness, exile, sexuality, and the nature of good and evil, all of which are treated within a metaphysical world influenced by Head's blend of Hindu philosophy and Christianity. The novel is rich in symbolism and can be read with psychoanalytic theories in mind. Head's other works include When Rain Clouds Gather (1968), Maru (1971), The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977), Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981), and A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1984). 

Ayi Kwei Armah

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1939- )

Ghanaian novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, considered one of Africa’s most important writers. Armah also is one of the sharpest interpreters of the condition of African nations—past, present, and future.Armah’s first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), delivers a strong critique of corruption in newly independent African states and remains highly controversial. In the novel, he uses images of filth, slime, excrement, and rot to convey the greed, bribery, and fraud that threaten to strangle the best qualities of a new African nation. Armah’s second novel, Fragments (1970), is considered partly autobiographical. It deals with a young African man, Baako, who returns home after study in the United States to find his family caught up in material acquisition. The novel’s symbolism is embedded in the story of a traditional “outdooring”ceremony for a newborn. The family speeds up the ceremony to reap the gifts that accompany it, resulting in the child’s death. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) is a portrait of three would-be revolutionaries in a fictional north African country, each struggling with the loss of their idealism.Perhaps Armah’s most stunning achievement is Two Thousand Seasons (1973), a historical novel set in precolonial Africa. It deals with migrations of peoples, enslavement of Africans by both Arabs and Europeans, and the possibility of resistance to colonialism. Armah creates a griot (a traditional storyteller-historian) from an ancient African community to tell the history of the struggle of Africans. The Healers (1978) continues this theme, returning to Africa’s precolonial past and the dissolution of the Ashanti Kingdom in the 1800s to examine causes of contemporary political ruin. The later novel Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (1995) adds another volume to Armah’s commentary on African history. 

African Writing in English

Ayi Kwei Armah 

Kofi Awoonor

Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor (1935-2013 )

African Writing in English

Ghanaian poet and novelist. His works in English focus on life in Ghana following independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, but they also draw heavily from the traditional literature of the Ewe culture in which he grew up.His first novel, This Earth, My Brother...:An Allegorical Tale of Africa (1971), remains his most widely read work. In it he writes of a young lawyer’s coming to terms with post-colonial West African society. As in his early poetry, Awoonor employs rhythms and motifs from traditional Ewe dirges to express the alienation and anguish that demand a restructuring, refocusing, and revitalizing of individual and communal order in contemporary Africa.In his second novel, Comes the Voyager at Last (1991), Awoonor examines the process of an African American coming to Africa and finding his roots.