Sacred Spaces in Southern African Literature: From Mhudi to Mutemwa

Abstract

This article examines the representation of sacred spaces in the novels of four authors from southern Africa and their translations. It critically considers the representation of sacred spaces and the marginalisation of some areas of Africa. The selected passages feature common themes, such as the dispossession of the soil. A convenient distinction between sacred spaces is made in this article through categorising these spaces as apotropaic, chthonic, mystic and messianic, and theological and epiphanic. Translations into the Romance languages of predominantly Catholic countries show evidence of textual divergence in the cohesion of symbols, lexico-semantic shifts, and cultural domestication. Whether this is imputed to ideological barriers and sociocultural filters is a matter for further investigation. Ultimately, the challenging issue is whether there is still space for the sacred in world literature.

Keywords:

• sacred spaces
• southern African literature
• religious symbolism
• translation
• textual cohesion
• domestication

Notes

1 There are studies from which the African continent is excluded, such as Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity (Sheldrake 2001), and where the focus is on the American continent (Lane 1988). Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (Scott and Simpson-Housley 2001) features four contributions on Africa: three on Nigeria and one on Kenya, with an interesting article by Trevor James (2001) titled “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Theology of Landscape”, but none on southern Africa. Sacred Sites, Sacred Places (Carmichael at al. 1994) has six articles on Africa: one on Cameroon, four on Kenya, and one on Madagascar. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Darian-Smith, Gunner, and Nuttall 1996) inaugurated a cross-cultural and comparative perspective. Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes (Zeleza and Kalipeni 1999) focuses also on therapeutic and symbolic spaces. The more recent African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change (Ogundayo and Adekunle 2019) features eight contributions on Nigeria and one on Zimbabwe.

2 The seminal work Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Basnett and Trivedi 1999) does not include Africa. Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures: Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts (Bertacco 2014) features two contributions on African literatures: one by Chantal Zabus and the other by Doris Sommer and Naseemah Mohamed. Recent contributions also expand the question of postcolonial to “glottopolitics” and epistemological factors (Fraiture 2018).

3 Plaatje’s native language was Setswana and his translations of Shakespeare were the first into an African language (Seddon 2004). The foreword to Mhudi, written more than a century ago, is significant: “South African literature has hitherto been almost exclusively European so that a foreword seems necessary to give reasons for a ‘Native venture’ as the main purpose is to interpret to the reading public ‘the back of the Native mind’” (Plaatje [1930] 2014, xi). This venture was aimed at preventing the loss of memory and the Tswana oral traditions. Although Plaatje’s descriptions are inscribed within the framework of Christian theology, space is conceptualised as a voice from one’s own people, that is from “within” (Inge 2003).

4 Plaatje wrote his Native Life in South Africa in 1914; four years later, Mofolo finished his Chaka. Native Life was first published in London, during the First World War (see Plaatje 1916). Plaatje’s (1973) diary as an interpreter during the Boer War and the siege at Mafeking is further evidence of his topophilic inspiration and love for the land and the people.

5 In all excerpts, the use of italics has been added for the sake of highlighting relevant elements.

6 The Canadian linguists Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet, in their seminal work Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958), proposed seven procedures of translation: borrowing, calque, literal, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation. Modulation entails a change in the perspective and is expressed through verbs of movement, direction, and agency and the relations between body and space. A shift in perspective is a translational strategy used when there are lexico-semantic constraints and interlinguistic verbal dissymmetry. Interestingly, Sévry (1998) wrote an article on the challenging nature of the task and the impossibility of fidelity when translating African Anglophone literature.

7 The contrast between night and day is not present in the 1992 cinematic adaptation, which features no mountain, as the camera sweeps over a vast valley illuminated by the light of the sun. Film adaptations of southern African literature highlight not only spatial representations but also issues related to dubbing and translanguaging (Tomei 2022; Tomei and Chetty 2021).

8 We gratefully acknowledge permission from the archive and database of the John Bradburne Memorial Society for the citation of verses. See http://johnbradburnepoems.com/public/home.aspx.

9 The question of burials and of physical earth is, however, a factor with an impact both metaphysical and biological. As argued by Clare Brown: “Landscape and its images influenced and were utilized by missionaries, functioning as tokens of belonging, interpretative tools, and sites of territorial possession for example through burial. For indigenous peoples, missionary images of place could also betoken otherness, and conflict with alternative expressions of rooted belonging, for instance in the use of earth as part of the physical substance of indigenous religious art” (2018, 31; emphasis added).

10 “Inyanga” can mean “first-born” or “mystery”.

11 Possibly a reference to Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose”: “shortfall tale” refers to the sad conclusion on love in Wilde’s story: “What a silly thing love is”.

12 “Ephrata”, meaning “fruitful”, is identified with Ephrat/Bethlehem, and announces a messianic time.

13 The date of the massacre of the seven missionaries of Musami.

14 In Toward a Science of Translating (1964), Eugene Nida analysed the translation of equivalence in religious texts. In The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West, Louis Kelly (1979, 69–108) highlighted religious translations and the function of “symbol”.

15 “Domestication” and “foreignisation” are concepts explored by Lawrence Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995). Domestication is subservience to the receiving culture and its literary system.

16 The series “Toposophia: Thinking Space/Making Place”, launched by Lexington Rowman in 2010, focuses on an interdisciplinary approach, although literature is not its main object.