- In order to distinguish between Afrikaans and so-called ‘Bantu languages’ without categorising the former as non-African, I have used the term ‘indigenous’ African languages. Isi-Lungu shares the same root form with um-lungu or ‘white person’ in isiZulu and isiXhosa, but specifically refers to the English language. Of course, adopting the word ‘indigenous’ might itself be problematic in the context of this article, if taken to connote fixed, authentic and clearly delineated constructions of'native' knowledge. I leave readers to deduce the identity politics played out in my choice of terminology
- Niranjana , T. 1992 . Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context Berkeley (1;T. Niranjana, ‘Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures’, Cultural Dynamics, 10, 2 (1988), 133
- In its common usage this isiXhosa phrase (‘izilimi zesiNtu’ in isiZulu) refers to ‘indigenous’ South African languages. However, in recent debate it has also been used more expansively than formerly to include Afrikaans (not English). I am indebted to Vukile Khumalo for this point
- 1995 . For a discussion of this term, see I. Hofmeyr, ‘“Wailing for Purity”: Oral Studies in South African Studies’, African Studies, 54, 2
- Bozzoli , B. 1987 . Class, Community and Conflict Edited by: Bozzoli , B. 9 – 10 . Johannesburg ‘Class, Community and Ideology in the Evolution of South African Society’, in, ed.
- 1920s . Class, Community and Conflict , Elsabe Brink uses quotes from Afrikaans and provides English translations. Luli Callinicos's popular history series produced on behalf of the History Workshop The volume contains some examples. While Jeff Peires included a few choice phrases from Afrikaans and Xhosa in ‘The Legend of Fenners-Solomon’, he was content to provide English textes marked as ‘translated from’ these languages. In ‘A Forgotten Corner of the Transvaal: Reconstructing the History of a Relocated Community through Oral History and Song’, Patrick Harries did not explain or discuss how or why sources were translated and presented only in English. Although William Beinart used written and possibly oral sources that were originally rendered in Xhosa in ‘Women in Rural Politics: Herschel District in the and 1930s’, these were also presented in unproblematic English. Afrikaans texts received better treatment. In ‘Maar ‘n Klomp “Factory Meide”: Afrikaner Family and Community on the Witwatersrand during the 1920s’,A People's History of South Africa, was probably aimed at African workers and scholars, among others. But volumes in the series, such as Working Life 1840–1940 (Johannesburg, 1987), also feature African languages as occasional phrases and refrains. According to an article by Callinicos, the ‘burgeoning of popular history writers’ in the late 1980s did involve some production of African language texts. Aimed at adult literacy classes or trade union members, and written ‘for those who prefer to read the histories in the vernacular’, these were apparently translations from English. Tim Keegan also tells the life stories of rural South Africans entirely in English: T. Keegan, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa (Cape Town, 1988)
- Bozzoli , B. and Nkotsoe , M. 1991 . Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy and Migrancy in South Africa 1900–1983 5 – 10 . Johannesburg
- Ibid, 12
- Niranjana . Siting Translation 1–2. Niranjana argues that efforts to ‘give an institutional character to translation’ coincided with but remained ‘largely unmarked by the rise of post-structuralism and literary studies’. (She also discusses critiques of anthropology and ethnography's approaches to translation and their complicity with colonial projects made from within the disciplines.)
- Ibid., 6, 9, 47.
- Here, I am drawing on Niranjana'a discussion of a quote from a poem by Chapman, seventeenth-century translator of the Iliad, where the ghost of Homer tells his translator that ‘thou didst English me’: Ibid., 53. Niranjana argues that ‘in this phrase we see a foreshadowing of the nature of translative acts performed more than a hundred years later by early Orientalists associated with the East India Company’
- Bozzoli . Women of Phokeng 1–3
- Minkley , G. , Rassool , C. , Nuttal , E. and Coetzee , S. 1998 . Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa 95 Cape Town eds
- Ibid., 264
- 1978 . Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena Cape Town A recent example of ‘oral testimony’ provides a contrast to such authorship designations and compares interestingly to other examples of ambiguous ‘co-authoriship’ such as Elsa Joubert's (which is discussed more extensively below. As sole author Mpho M'atsepo of Singing A way the Hunger (Durban, 1996) explains, her motsoale (which she translates as ‘very close friend’)—the book's editor Kendall—convinced her to tell her life story. The latter's inability to master Sesotho was one reason why she did so in English. M'atsepo elaborated on why she could ‘tell these better iri Sesotho’ than in ‘Sekhooa, the white people's language’, and on what telling the stories in English was like. A brief postscript by Kendall attempts to problematise projects ‘using black women as a front for their own white voices’. She discusses the collaboration between M'atsepo—expert story teller and reponsible for all the ‘artistic activity’ involved—and herself. She was ‘rather more than a typist’ in her role as listener and scribe, able to draw on her own history of performing stories
- Bozzoli . Women of Phokeng 5
- Carlie Coetzee traces some of the ways in which one such figure has been remembered: see C. Coetzee, ‘Krotoa Remembered: A Mother of Unity, a Mother of Sorrows’, in Nuttall and Coetzee, Negotiating the Past. Coetzee does not discuss any instances of Krotoa/Eva represented by black writers or in anti-colonial discourse—indeed, her emphasis is on performer Antoinette Pienaar's efforts to recast a figure of derision as a fore-mother of Afrikaners. For another celebratory reference to a female subject who translated herself into colonial society, read the references to ‘Maria van die Kaap’ by Antjie Krog against those discussed by Leslie Witz: A. Krog, ‘My Boer War’, Mail & Guardian, 8–14 Oct. 1999 and L. Witz, ‘Commemorations and Conflicts in the Production of South African National Pasts: The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1997). My unresearched guess would be that the particular position and role of court interpreters have much to do with the various meanings of ‘humusha’. It is interesting to consider the fraught position of interpreters at TRC hearings (they explicitly refused the label ‘translators’) who provided running ‘interpretations’ of testimony by victims and perpetrators of human rights violations. In Country of My Skull (Johannesburg, 1998), Antjie Krog observes the particular tensions involved in this labour. In the play Ubu and the Truth Commission, a fascinating dramatisation of extracts from ‘victim hearings’ has wooden puppets ‘speaking’ in the vernacular, and an actor in a glass ‘interpreter's booth' (which also doubles as a shower for the Vlakplaas perpetrator/Ubu after his bombing expeditions) providing the English version
- Matunda , D. Interview with Mr Rhayi by, in ‘Remembering the Pass Laws’, PHP research extracts
- Dent , C. R. and Nyembezi , C. L.S. 1995 . A Scholar's Zulu Dictionary 295 Pietermaritzburg (My analysis runs parallel to that offered by Niranjana in Siting Translation, 8. Niranjana explains that she uses ‘the word translation not just to indicate an interlingual process but to name an entire problematic. It is a set of questions, perhaps a ‘field’, charged with the force of all the terms used, even by the traditional discourse on translation, to name the problem, and to translate translation.’
- Niranjana . Siting Translation, 168–9
- van Onselen , C. 1993 . The Reconstruction of a Rural Life from Oral Testimony: Critical Notes on the Methodology Employed in the Study of a Black South African Sharecropper . Journal of Peasant Studies , 20 ( 3 ) : 498 – 506 .
- Rassool , Minkley and . ‘Orality, Memory and Social History in South Africa’, 99–100
- Onselen , Van . ‘Reconstruction of a Rural Life’, 508–9
- Niranjana . Siting Translation 58
- Here . I am drawing on Niranjana's understanding of ‘historicity’ as ‘that part of the past that is still operative in the present’, as incorporating ‘quesitons of translation/re-translation, how the translation/re-translation works, why the text was/is translated, and who did/does the translating’: Ibid., 37
- Delius , P. 1996 . A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal, 1930–1994 Oxford
- Hofmeyr . ‘Wailing for Purity’, 18
- Hofmeyr , I. 1994 . ‘We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom 3 Johannesburg
- Ndlovu , S. 1998 . ‘He Did what Any Other Person in his Position would have Done to Fight the Forces of Invasion and Disruption: Africans, Land and contending Images of King Dingana (‘the Patriot’) in the Twentieth Century, 1916—1950s’ . South African Historical Journal , 38 (Iain Edwards quotes from Ilanga lase Natal and interviews in English translation: see I. Edwards, ‘Cato Manor, June 1959’, in I. Edwards and P. Maylam, eds, The People's City: African Life in Twentieth Century Durban (Durban, 1996). Jeff Opland's excavations of Xhosa literature published in ‘vernacular’ newspapers stand in sharp contrast: see J. Opland, Xhosa Poets and Poetry (Cape Town, 1998). See also his and P.T. Mtuze's edited volume of extracts from Xhosa literature which covers more than a century and is published entirely in isiXhosa: Izwi Labantu (Cape Town, 1994). Some recent contributions from the field of linguistics include S. Makoni, ‘African Languages as European Scripts: The Shaping of Communal Memory’, in Nuttall and Coetzee, Negotiating the Past, R. Mesthrie, ‘Words across Worlds: Aspects of Language Contact and Language Learning in the Eastern Cape, 1800–1850’, African Studies, 57 (1998). For historical research that draws on letters from mission archives written in isiZulu, see also V. Khumalo, ‘Ekukhanyeni Letter-Writers: Notes towards a Social History of Letter Writing in Kwa-Zulu/Natal—South Africa, 1890–1900’ (History and African Studies Seminar Series, University of Natal, Durban, 1999)
- Niranjana , See . 1994 . Siting Translation and H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London
- See , M . 1990 . Transforming the Cutting Edge: Report on the People's History Programme, University of the Western Cape, 1987–1989 . Perspectives in Education , 122 ( 1 ) Fullard et al, (A. Odendaal, ‘Developments in Popular History in the Western Cape in the 1980s’, Radical History Review, 46/7 (Winter 1990);G. Minkley and N. Rousseau, ‘“This Narrow Language”: People's History and the University: Reflections from the University of the Western Cape’, South African Historical Journal, 34 (1996)
- Rousseau , Minkley and . ‘This Narrow Language’, 191–5
- 1999 . For a discussion of the broader contextof'neo-colonial language policy and practice' in South Africa as well as elsewhere in Africa, see N. Alexander, ‘An African Renaissance without African Languages?’
- Hibbert , L. , Leibowitz , B. and Volbrecht , T. 1995 . AD Dialogues , 4 See, for example, in (For an interesting discussion that problematises the hierarchies of language at UWC to a greater extent, see AD Issues, 4, 1 (1996) (which debates ‘Multilingu-alism at UWC) as well as AD Issues, 5, 1 (1997)
- 1996 . Student evaluation of the People's History Programme module, I have used extracts from the work students did as part of the People's History Programme and commented on our classroom activities with some ambivalence, not least because doing so was not negotiated before or during the course. However, partly because the issues I raise are relevant to ‘junior’ researchers, I decided to compromise myself and go ahead. I have tried to focus on my teaching and to highlight student perceptions of the course, instead of over-analysing student work and responses. Discussions and debate that took certain turns because the course was perceived as a ‘safe’ space have either been left out or presented in very abbreviated form. Whether I have succeeded in at least ‘anthropologising’ myself as much as my students whilst discussing hierarchies in academia remains an open question. A more detailed analysis of the texts produced by myself as well as participants in the course remains an interesting project, perhaps for former students of the programme
- du Toit , M. 1997 . The People's History Project: Exploring Multilingualism in a Research Course . AD Issues , 5 ( 1 )
- Ibid.
- Twelve out of 16 students chose to do group projects, which involved combining extracts from their interview transcripts into ‘radio scripts’. The rest worked individually and in the traditional essay format. This project is described more extensively in Du Toit, ‘The People's History Project’
- Toit , Du . ‘The People's History Project’
- 1996 . Student evaluations of the People's History Programme module
- 1995 . A survey in indicated that a ‘massive 99%’ of students who spoke an African language at home ‘felt that English should be the language to study in’. Also, more than 70 per cent of the students surveyed ‘rejected the increased use of their own language at university’: C. Deyers, ‘Language Attitudes amongst First Year Students at UWC, AD Issues, 4, 1 (1996)
- 1997 . Student evaluation of the People's History Programme module
- Minkley and Rousseau, ‘This Narrow Language’, 190–1
- AT, report on research planning
- Kondlo , K. M. 1997 . ‘Aspects of Culture among the Squatters in Cape Town, 1946–1960’ (unpublished paper, Cape Town History Project
- Joubert , E. 1995 . Die Swerjffare van Poppie Nongena. Presented as autobiography, Joubert tells the story of a woman who grew up in Upington and a west-coast fishing village, married a Xhosa man from Herschel in the eastern Cape and spent some time in her husband's village. Eventually her efforts to survive led her to Cape Town's squatter camps. I also used an extract, in isiXhosa and English, from Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's Children/Kubantawana Bantwana Bam (Cape Town, which recalls the strong sense of ‘a place to which I belonged’, defined as ‘less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected …’ (‘asinguwo umhlaba lo umiweyo koko ndithetha ngabantu endinonxulumano nabo nendilunge kubo …’). I asked students to relate this to Joubert's Poppie. In her introduction, Elsa Joubert explains that Poppie Nongena was based on extensive interviews with an informant who remained anonymous for her protection. Poppie is presented as a seamless narrative with Joubert as the author, but as if ‘Poppie’ tells her story in idiomatic Afrikaans with a smattering of Xhosa phrases. Most students read the English translation, but some chose the original Afrikaans version. The translation was by Joubert herself and to some extent glosses over complexities in the original (classroom discussion involved comparison of the texts). For example, the novel opens with Poppie's description of her people as ‘boorlinge’ (longtime inhabitants) of Gordonia in the northern Cape. In translation, this reference to region is jettisoned in favour of an assertion of ‘Xhosa’ ancestry
- Reports on research planning
- MDM Report on research planning
- AM, report on research planning
- The first session involved students working on questions they could ask about childhood, using a child's stokmannetjie (stick-figure) in the middle of the page, and drawing branches designated as representing different themes radiating outward—each of these branched off with more and more detailed questions—all written down in the language/s of students' interviewees. Students could then be asked to decide whether these questions were ‘leading’, reasonably time-specific and explored both male and female experience
- Slim , H. and Thompson , P. 1993 . Listening for a Change: Oral Testimony and Development London See (A number of interviews in 1997 clearly suffered from dogged following of the interview questions drawn up beforehand. After one excellent interview where the student had developed a more flexible approach, he argued: ‘The flow of information made it difficult for me to follow my questionaire. I then resorted to a new strategy of asking questions according to what comes out of his mouth. That served a good deal because I managed to cover up all my questions … some of the information was not on the list. In that way, I had to get more information. I had to control him but in a cunning way that I make him not feel tired and bored’: MDM, report on research planning. In 1998, we discussed different interview styles more explicitly than previously, using student interviews as examples. The result was a far larger number of interviews where students, having worked through possible questions, worked these into free-flowing ‘conversations’
- TDR, Reports on research planning. Students were instructed to transcribe in the original language, and to translate only the questions they had asked into English to facilitate my reading
- NBJ, Reports on research planning
- A first-language speaker who studied honours in isiXhosa and helped me translate was also wont to ‘correct’ various ‘mistakes’ which seemed to be verbatim transcriptions
- HY, Report on research planning
- 1997 . In, two (out of 24) students worked in these languages. The following year, the two (out of 28) students who spoke Setswana and Sesotho at home chose to interview in isiXhosa and English. Seswati and isiZulu-speaking students also chose to work in isiXhosa
- 1997 . Student evaluation of the People's History Programme Module, and 1998. The questions I asked included: ‘How do you feel about your lecturer's efforts to speak isiXhosa/Afrikaans in class? And outside of class/in consultations? How do you feel about the classes where questions/texts/exercises in different languages were incorporated? Do you feel you benefited from this? To what extent did you use your language in class discussions and activities? Would you have liked other courses in the history department to include the use of your home language in class or in the readings provided? Why or why not?
- Hoffmann , E. 1991 . Lost in Translation 107 London
- 1998 . I experimented with this possibility in a second-year history course (Africa, Race and Empire) at UWC in, the theme being representations of Nongqawuse in both popular and academic historians' accounts of the ‘Cattle-Killing’ of 1856. Drawing on Helen Bradford's critique (1996) of Peires, students were provided with the original text by W.W. Gqoba, ‘isiZatu zokuxelwa Kwe nkomo Ngo Nongqause’ (Isigidimi SamaXhosa, 1888). Bradford had questioned Peires's translation of particular words from Nongqawuse's prophecy and their apparent elision from earlier translations. In class (where central questions and concepts were presented in isiXhosa and Afrikaans as well as in English), students could themselves assess the validity of the historians' different interpretations of the texts and representations of Nongqawuse
- Hofmeyr has discussed the choices confronting scholars concerned ‘with the spoken word’ when trying to decide how to present these in writing: see Hofmeyr, We Spend Our Years, xi-xiii
- This would be an interesting area of debate for work on TRC ‘testimonies’. TRC staff insisted that they were ‘interpreters’, not ‘translators’, of testimony at the TRC
- I-siko and isi-thethe is in the singular form, ama-siko and izi-thethe are the plural forms
- Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are by myself, from student definitions written down in isiXhosa
- Students provided equivalents in Sesotho, Setswana etc. or used isiXhosa as a shorthand for shared concepts
- 1998 . Course evaluation, These were some of the categories students could circle on evaluation forms. The same student wrote that he ‘benefited’ from being able to use his home language in class and liked the multi-lingual approach ‘coz it does not discriminate’
- Bhabha, Location of Culture, 21
- Here I am attempting a translation in context. ‘IsiNtu’ (capitalised when written) seems to refer to African tradition, but the meaning of the word as currently used is by no means fixed. I am indebted to Vukile Khumalo for pointing this out
- 1999 . A recent edition features an article on the plight of widows critical of their treatment by deceased husbands' families. According to one founding member of a widows' self-help organisation, amasiko should not always be followed:' Amalungelo abesimame angamalungelo esintu futhi angamalungelo abafelokazi… Ngiyawahloniphafuthi ngiyawazisa amasiko esiNtu kodwangeke ngilubekezekele usiko oluthunaza isithunzi sabesimame… Abantu banomkhuba wokucashangamasiko umabehlose ukucindezela abafelokazi' (‘Women have rights as human beings and as widows … I respect and I treasure African tradition but I will never tolerate a custom that degrades women … People hide behind customs when they want to oppress widows’): Bona, Zulu edition, July. The magazine is published in isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho and English. The process of translation between different editions is somewhat mysterious—it is often difficult to know in which language the original words were spoken—or which was first used by thejournalist writing the article. More detailed attention and analysis in the classroom of the different and often sensitive ways in which students and their interviewees explored their chosen themes as they participated in the construction of converational narratives in the vernacular would also have benefited the discussions. Some of the best interviews and essays involved the explorations of gendered aspects of ‘tradition’, employing a wider vocabulary than that interrogated in class (‘inkqubo yesiNtu’‘isiko nesithethe sakwendeni’, etc). Extracts from some of these, for example by interviewers David Matunda and Gertrude Makamu are included in a seminar on ‘culture and cultural change’. The original transcripts of all interviews form part of the People's History Programme archive
- Peterson , D. 1997 . ‘Colonizing Language? Missionaries and Gikuyu Dictionaries, 1904 and 1914’ . History in Africa , 24 (Rajend Meshtrie examines the ‘beginnings of literacy in African languages and the codification of what was to become standard Xhosa in grammars and dictionaries’ in the eastern Cape, looking particularly at the ‘rudimentary interlanguages’ and ‘pidginlike varieties’ employed by missionaries when trying to communicate, and at the role of interpreters with fluency in Cape Dutch and Xhosa: Mesthrie, ‘Words across Worlds’. Research on missionary efforts elsewhere in Africa include. I am not familiar with similar research in a South African context, but Jeff Guy has referred to Harriet Colenso's involvement in compiling a Zulu dictionary and changing definitions of particular words through different editions: see J. Guy, ‘Imperial Appropriations: A History of Iziqu' (Paper presented to the History and African Studies Seminar Series, University of Natal, Durban, 1999)
- But see Bhabha's argument that ‘the process of translation is the opening up of another contentious political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation’: Bhabha, Location of Culture, 33. In Bhabha's reading (with reference to India of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century) ‘in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid’
- Examples are the interview by N. Somtsewu with S. Rhwayi, and S. Mahlangu's interview with N.A. Mnyatheli. People's History Programme Archives
- 191. . Minkley and Rousseau, ‘This Narrow Language’
- Ibid., 99
- Woodward , W. , Hayes , P. and Minkley , G. 1999 . 1 ‘Sounding the Spaces: Some (Re)Locations of Voices and Silences in Recent Colonial and Literary Debates’ (Paper presented at ‘Relocating Literature: Africa and India’ Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Sep.
- Ibid, 1–2
- Ibid, 2.
- Applying ‘Foucault's notion of the proliferation of power in various locations to theorising hitherto unrecognised forms of voicing' include considering the power of'performative acts' such as play, mime dance and visual signifying practices such as painting
- Woodward, Hayes and Minkley, ‘Sounding the Spaces’, 7
- In this respect, Magona's choices as a writer are interesting. Her first novel, To My Children's Children—Kubantwana Bantwana Bam—was written consecutively in English and isiXhosa. She chose to write her latest book in English
- Narayanan , V. 1949 . ‘In Search of’ (Paper presented at the History and African Studies Seminar Series, University of Natal, Durban, 1999)
- Defining an audience/audiences would involve confronting the notion of a legacy of'apartheid' spacialities that coalesce with linguistic boundaries. But constructing linguistically ‘hybrid’ texts that also explore the fluidity between (for example) supposedly distinct language such as isiXhosa and Afrikaans would also present opportunities to explore critically such visions of the past
- Witz , L. , Minkley , G. and Rassool , C. 1999 . 22 ‘Who Speaks for “South African” Pasts?’ (Paper presented to the South African Historical Society Conference, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town
- Ibid, 21–2
- Ibid, 6–13
- 1999 . A recent display (in the South African Museum of ‘traditional knowledge’ is one example. A refreshing departure from this approach is a recently established exhibition of ‘traditional weapons’ in the Natal Museum (Pietermaritzburg);the display, which presents ‘tradition’ as dynamic and fluid, equally incorporates isiZulu and English
- I have yet to find out the dynamics of the TRC's reduction of a multiplicity of tongues to English transcripts—apparently using interpretations provided during the hearings. Apparently, the original recordings of victims' own testimonies in an African language have not been transcribed. Ironically, the popularised, English version of its findings is being rendered into African languages
- Hartman , W. 1998 . The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History 8 Cape Town Much of the work in visual history referred to by Witz, Minkley and Rassool has been produced by historians of Namibia: Seeet al, eds, (In the chapter ‘Photography, Memory and History’, Hayes et al discuss how projects in Namibia have sought to ‘open up the files of the pictorial archives to the public gaze’ (p.). These have involved the use of different languages (I have yet to examine how), and my comments about monolingualism are not intended to apply to such efforts
- Dumais , M. and Coward , H. , eds. 1995 . Le wendood Cape Town Writers of fiction and poetry in Afrikaans have long made forays into other languages, knitting together hybrid texts. See, for example, Breyten Breytenbach's (whose poems combine (for example) Afrikaans, isiZulu, Latin, Spanish, Vietnamese and English. In ‘Vir ‘n Pers Huis’, written in both Afrikaans and English, the different languages allow particular expressions of sexuality. S. Simon discusses poetic experiments in bi-lingual texts, translation and retranslation: S. Simon, ‘Border Writing in Quebec’, in S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi, eds, PostColonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London, 1999). Another interesting example in multi-lingual writing by a feminist academic is, eds, Silence, the Word and the Sacred (Waterloo, 1989)
- See Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Who Speaks’, 22–3, for a discussion of'new types of history' being written in the academy that ‘experiment with the boundaries of the historian's genre—for example, by transgressing conventions of the authorial voice and the borders of'history' and ‘fiction’
- 1994 . Triomf Cape Town In this respect, historians could learn from the ways in which some novelists have played with language. Writing in Afrikaans, Marlene van Niekerk produced a searing account, of Sophiatown's destruction in (Her (third person) narrator inhabits an Afrikaans in which racism is deeply embedded—this account of forced removal, so often told with anger or nostalgia, is here voiced in the language of an Afrikaans woman eagerly watching, awaiting her chance for a house in a space declared ‘white’. Van Niekerk's prose, read against the familiar core narrative of Sophiatown's destruction, becomes a powerful exploration of violence, investedness in a racialised identity, and loss. The tensions created through writing in an Afrikaans evocative of time, place and a particular social identity are central to her project
- Bhabha, Location of Culture, 220–4
South African Historical Journal
Volume 42, 2000 - Issue 1