Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1926106
K. Osigwe
The theme of motherhood and childbearing is not new in African women’s literature. In fact, it is one of the recurrent subjects in most first-generation and second-generation African women’s writing, including Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) and One Is Enough (1981), Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981), Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), to mention a few. These women writers focus so much on marriage, motherhood, and family matters that some critics have described their works as “domestic literature” or simply “motherhood literature” (Nnaemeka 1994; Ogundipe-Leslie 1987).
{"title":"Zikora: A Short Story","authors":"K. Osigwe","doi":"10.1080/10131752.2021.1926106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2021.1926106","url":null,"abstract":"The theme of motherhood and childbearing is not new in African women’s literature. In fact, it is one of the recurrent subjects in most first-generation and second-generation African women’s writing, including Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) and One Is Enough (1981), Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter (1981), Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen (1974) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), to mention a few. These women writers focus so much on marriage, motherhood, and family matters that some critics have described their works as “domestic literature” or simply “motherhood literature” (Nnaemeka 1994; Ogundipe-Leslie 1987).","PeriodicalId":41471,"journal":{"name":"English Academy Review-Southern African Journal of English Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"81 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82319513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1930879
R. Chetty, M. Curr
Abstract Ronnie Govender entitled both his major play (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977) and his later novel (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) The Lahnee’s Pleasure, articulating that life was, and still is, a pleasure ground for a privileged minority in South Africa. Over a period of three decades, spanning both the periods before and after apartheid, his assessment of political conditions in the country of his birth remains as valid. Lao, in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia, reveals how much of life in Europe today remains a “fairground for the favoured” (London: Head of Zeus, 2014, 108) and how little pampered and privileged people such as Jim, the director of the film project in this novel, see or comprehend of what is so often a secret ordeal for a person of colour. Okri writes of conditions and perceptions in contemporary Britain, while Govender writes of South Africa up to the present time; yet despite the many differences in their social contexts, their delineation of conditions that surround a person of colour living in British or South African society shows that interracial equality and brotherhood are still distant ideals in both countries. Both writers, however, do hold out a measured degree of hope in their depiction of Wordsworthian figures of humble labour: Mothie in Govender’s novel and the train driver in Okri’s.
{"title":"Humiliated Consciousness in Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s Pleasure and Ben Okri’s In Arcadia","authors":"R. Chetty, M. Curr","doi":"10.1080/10131752.2021.1930879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2021.1930879","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ronnie Govender entitled both his major play (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977) and his later novel (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) The Lahnee’s Pleasure, articulating that life was, and still is, a pleasure ground for a privileged minority in South Africa. Over a period of three decades, spanning both the periods before and after apartheid, his assessment of political conditions in the country of his birth remains as valid. Lao, in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia, reveals how much of life in Europe today remains a “fairground for the favoured” (London: Head of Zeus, 2014, 108) and how little pampered and privileged people such as Jim, the director of the film project in this novel, see or comprehend of what is so often a secret ordeal for a person of colour. Okri writes of conditions and perceptions in contemporary Britain, while Govender writes of South Africa up to the present time; yet despite the many differences in their social contexts, their delineation of conditions that surround a person of colour living in British or South African society shows that interracial equality and brotherhood are still distant ideals in both countries. Both writers, however, do hold out a measured degree of hope in their depiction of Wordsworthian figures of humble labour: Mothie in Govender’s novel and the train driver in Okri’s.","PeriodicalId":41471,"journal":{"name":"English Academy Review-Southern African Journal of English Studies","volume":"31 1","pages":"39 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79443537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1930910
M. Curr
This book is divided into five sections: “The Alchemy of Life”, “Rebalancing the Triadic Elements of Life”, “The Mercurial Imaginary: The Writer as ‘Demiurge’ (Artist/Craftsman)”, “The Wheel of Transformation: The Writer as Lodestar (Guide)”, and “In Search of the Marvellous: The Sacred Ziggurat”. These distinctions allow the writer to create a structure within which to order a discussion of the wide array of Okri’s texts while, at the same time, providing a trajectory which tracks the growth and purchase of Okri’s wisdom. It is apparent from the titles of these five sections that Gray is chiefly concerned with the spiritual dimensions of Okri’s attitudes.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1938365
L. Wright
Abstract This article, based on archival research, discusses the discovery, origins, and genesis of a lost play by the Hollywood scriptwriter John Bright, written in collaboration with Wulf Sachs and derived from the latter’s famous psycho- documentary Black Hamlet (1937). The playscript was discovered by the author in 2018 in the Library of Congress. The article investigates its origins, speculates as to how it was that its two progenitors came to collaborate, and pieces together a history of the project from the papers of Leah Salisbury, the New York theatrical agent who handled the property. The play embodies an effort in the late 1940s by two white writers to intervene in the American civil rights movement from a southern African perspective by dramatising an even more catastrophic betrayal of justice in Africa, the ancestral “homeland” of Black Americans. Reasons why Bright’s play never made it to a Broadway stage, and how the script came to lodge unnoticed in the Library of Congress, are presented and analysed.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1941526
Sindiwe Magona
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1934980
M. Espin
Abstract The precarious existence endured by the communities depicted in John Berger’s late fiction bears some similarity to the condition of the human condition that Frantz Fanon examines in his The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout his adult life Berger maintained a deeply held concern for the plight of the marginalised and abandoned in society and often made this the subject of his discursive essays. This article examines Berger’s late fiction as representations of despair and of hope in the midst of the changing nature of contemporary society. In doing so, it attempts to establish connections between the state of the contemporary world which Fanon circumscribes. Achille Mbembe’s more recent work and, in particular, his reassigning of Fanon’s vision for a new world, is included in this reading of Berger’s fiction which, in its conclusion, seeks to demonstrate how some measure of hope for a different society can be envisioned through the imaginative and speculative possibilities which fiction promises.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2021.1932082
Luan Staphorst
Ben Okri has a unique relationship to Nelson Mandela University, the institution where I am based. A few months before finishing this review, during the summer graduation of 2020, he was awarded an honorary doctorate. This is by no means his first. In fact, it is his eighth, and his second African one, the first having been awarded by the University of Pretoria on Professor Rosemary Gray’s nomination in 2014. Considering this, together with his long list of literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Booker Prize, and his being conferred the class Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), it is strange that Rosemary Gray’s The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri is the first monograph solely devoted to his work. Yet, whilst it is a notable hiatus, there is perhaps no better author to present what will hopefully be the first of many book-length studies devoted to Okri’s oeuvre.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2020.1794327
Michael Williams
{"title":"David Levey","authors":"Michael Williams","doi":"10.1080/10131752.2020.1794327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2020.1794327","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41471,"journal":{"name":"English Academy Review-Southern African Journal of English Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"77 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73478703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2020.1832791
G. Fincham
Abstract Tracing the history of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape, Jacklyn Cock writes: “For me, the Kowie … connects a personal and a collective history, the social and the ecological, the sacred and the profane” (Writing the Ancestral River. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018, p. 4). She goes on to detail the initiation and induction practices of the Xhosa people indigenous to the Kowie, and then the historical dispossession of these people after the Battle of Grahamstown in 1819. The colonial construction of a harbour in 1838 was, much later, followed by the capitalist development of a marina in 1989. These “developments” caused both ecological damage to the Kowie and economic devastation for the Xhosa. In this article, Cock’s book is juxtaposed against another river-based text, Dominique Botha’s debut novel False River (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2013), which centres on the farm Rietpan in what was formerly the Orange Free State. Because water is so scarce in South Africa, rivers are divided and violently contested. Botha’s text shares with Cock’s book not only a history of colonialism in which indigenous people are dispossessed, but also an ecological vision that offers social solutions to this violence. Cock writes: “Perhaps we can connect with our very different histories through our ancestors, and with nature and justice through rivers” (144–45).
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2020.1855375
C. Mann
{"title":"Black Socks","authors":"C. Mann","doi":"10.1080/10131752.2020.1855375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2020.1855375","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41471,"journal":{"name":"English Academy Review-Southern African Journal of English Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"75 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83821445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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