It’s Heritage Month, when we connect with our culture: food, music, popular memory, history and language. We have eleven of them officially, although more are spoken. Like Nama, which will be introduced to some schools in the Northern Cape next year.
English and Afrikaans are the most visibly represented languages in SA, so it’s not surprising that most of our books are published in them – some 40% in English, 25% in Afrikaans. Which means that too few books are published in the other nine official languages.
To focus a bit of attention on the issue this Heritage Month, we’ve included books in three different languages: Xhosa, Afrikaans and English.
The name of Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi will be known to every Xhosaspeaking South African, or anyone who studied the language and its literature. Mqhayi, who was born in 1875 just outside Alice in the colonial Eastern Cape and died in 1945, is one of South Africa’s most prolific and most significant writers in any language. In Xhosa, the language in which he wrote exclusively, he is peerless.
But Mqhayi’s reputation suffers from a curious contradiction. One of South Africa’s major literary figures (he was a journalist, columnist, newspaper editor, teacher, praise poet, historian, essayist, translator, poet, biographer and novelist), Mqhayi is not widely known outside of the confines of Xhosa speakers and readers.
This, in part, is due to the deliberate denigration of African languages, a central pillar of the colonial and apartheid project. It is also fuelled by the ethnic and linguistic segregation that these two systems encouraged among Africans.
Mqhayi, known in his time as Imbongi yesizwe jikelele (the poet laureate of all the people), may have written only in Xhosa but was not exclusively concerned with the Xhosa. His own life spanned the critical gap between the colonial authorities’ final breaking of Xhosa and African resistance in the late 1800s and the advent of apartheid three years after his death. He would have lived through the bitter end of the Xhosa Wars and the spread of British rule throughout the Eastern Cape (he was himself the product of early missionary education), the South African War, the crushing of the Bhambatha’s rebellion, the passage of the Native Land Act in 1913, and both world wars.
Most of his work, whether written biography, performance poetry, or his numerous essays, reflect deep thought and concern at these momentous events. His work also reveals one of history’s first pan-Africanists, who believed that only united action by Africans would beat back the encroachment of colonialism and racism. About Shaka Ka Senzangakhona, founder of the modern Zulu nation and a man whom colonialism gave a terrible reputation, Mqhayi wrote: “Young educated men should note – this is a young man who went to study at his mother’s home, and returned with all the spoils to raise his own nation to swallow great nations. What is this practice of studying and applying what you’ve learnt far from home? What have you got to say, you new breed of educated Africans?”
This and many other historical essays, poems, columns and short biographical notes are to be found in this new collection of some of Mqhayi’s work, Abantu Besizwe (Historical and biographical writings 1902-1944), collected and edited by one of South Africa’s leading historians of the Eastern Cape, Jeff Opland.
All 65 collected essays and biographical pieces are published with English translations, the hope being that Opland’s effort will introduce Mqhayi to a wider South African and world audience.
His talent and the volume of his output deserve no less.
The Afrikaans language is very productive. Numerous authors come to mind. Karel Schoeman, a stalwart and recipient of many a coveted literary prize, died earlier this year. Leon van Nierop is a prolific writer of texts for TV and serialisation; Insomnia is his latest. Other great Afrikaans authors include Irna van Zyl, Karin Brynard, Deon Meyer, François Bloemhof, Ingrid Winterbach… the list is endless.
Misverstand was published in March. Van der Vyver, who lives in France, is the author of 11 novels, children’s literature and cookery books. Misverstand (misunderstanding) is set in Paris, France, and features the middleaged Willem Prins, a disenchanted author of erotic literature. Prins made a promising literary debut as a young man. But now, faced with lacklustre book sales, he writes erotica under a female pseudonym.
Divorced three times, no relationship with his Parisian son, despondently walking along the Seine with death in mind, life doesn’t have much to offer in this city of love.
But then Prins meets au pair Jackie, a fellow South African, and gets a new lease on life and love. Jackie is with him when all hell breaks loose in Paris on that memorable Friday the 13th, the night in 2015 when terror and death and the new blood-shedding
world is set loose. Terrorism has struck; violence against the man and woman on the street, old and young, rich and poor, skins of all hues. Extremism is the new watchword and Willem’s world is turned on its head. Indeed Aldous Huxley’s ‘brave new world’ is needed and Van der Vyver knows how to tell it.
Many have read the bestseller The Girl on the Train, the debut psychological thriller of Paula Hawkins. Into the water is the second book of this ex-Zimbabwean, now residing in London. It received mixed reviews, but the pace of sales has given her the scent of another hit.
The story of Nel and her sister, Jules, is at times captivating, at others irritating. The reader has to take note of so many points of view that it is at first puzzling to meet one character after another in the storyline.
Nel has died, but she has phoned her estranged sister numerous times, seeking help. Silence. Jules did not even pick up the phone to offer help. Nel is found dead in the water: has she fallen, jumped or been pushed from a cliff into the treacherous water with its history of the dead? Jules has to go back to the place where her own demons reside; the place with the treacherous waters they call the Drowning Pool.
Whether you like the dramatic telling is neither here nor there. You will finish reading the chilling story and be suspicious of all the characters Hawkins introduces.