Writers bear witness: South African English literature 1948 to 1976

WRITERS BEAR WITNESS: SOUTH AFRICAN ENGLISH LITERATURE 1948 TO 1976

Dr Rohan Quince, author; Jillian Vigrass, teacher and author; Jeremy Fogg, researcher

Friday 30 January  11.15 am  COURSE FEES R115; Staff and students R58

In 1948, as the National Party took power in South Africa, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country was achieving international success. The 1950s saw the imposition of strict segregation – and an explosion of writing, much of it critical of the new order. Novelists such as Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson and Peter Abrahams gained international recognition. DRUM magazine empowered young black writers like Can Themba and Es’kia Mphahlele.

The 1960s saw more oppressive segregation, with growing resistance, and increasingly violent suppression by the state. Athol Fugard dramatised it on stage; Douglas Livingstone, Ingrid Jonker and Dennis Brutus responded in verse; Alex La Guma and James Matthews conveyed it in stories.

In the early 1970s, poet Oswald Mtshali published Sounds of a Cowhide Drum, JM Coetzee published Dusklands, and Gordimer won the Booker prize for The Conservationist. Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona collaborated on Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island. Many writers were to find their work and themselves banned. In this presentation we tell the story of these years and perform excerpts showing how South Africa’s authors have illuminated our complicated history.

Recommended reading

Coetzee, JM. 1974. Dusklands. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Fugard, A. 1993. Township Plays. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Gordimer, N. 1975. No Place Like. United Kingdom: Jonathan Cape.

La Guma, A. 1962. A Walk in the Night. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Mphahlele, E. 1959. Down Second Avenue. United Kingdom: Faber and Faber.

TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/performance.aspx?itemid=1575245787

Jillian Vigrass Gorton (BA and STD, UCT, 1972) taught English A (Literature) and Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate, teaching in Ethiopia, Portugal and Switzerland. She also taught in state schools in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK. Her writing includes a play, Chimurenga Children, and an educational children’s story about malaria, Ozzee the Dozy Mozzee. She co-founded Writers Bear Witness in 2019.

Dr Rohan Quince (PhD, Southern Illinois University, 1987) taught English at Georgiam Southern University and, since 1994, at schools in Johannesburg. He published Shakespeare in South Africa in 2000. Shows at the National Arts Festival include World War 1 Remembered and What the Dickens! He runs the Shakespeare Club at the National Children’s Theatre in Johannesburg. He co-founded Writers Bear Witness in 2019.

Educated in Johannesburg, at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, Jeremy Fogg taught for some years in both cities. He became Researcher at the National English Literary Museum (now Amazwi Museum of South African Literature) in Grahamstown/ Makhanda, in 1986 and retired from that institution as Deputy Director in 2013. With Professor Paul Walters, he has published widely on the life and writings of Olive Schreiner. Together with his school friend, Rohan Quince, he participated in the National Arts Festival in 2017 - 2019.