Santa Clara University Scholar Commons English College of Arts & Sciences 4-30-1996 South African Writing in English John C. Hawley Santa Clara Univeristy,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hawley, J. C. (1996). South African Writing in English. In R. Mohanram and G. Rajan (Eds.), English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World (pp.53-62). Greenwood Press. English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World by Radhika Mohanram, Gita Rajan. Copyright © 1996 by Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of ABC-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara, CA. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. South African Writing in English John C. Hawley As commentators such as Lewis Nkosi and Malvern van Wyk Smith have noted, even though writers from South Africa occasionally engage in an exploration of traditional African values (as has preoccupied the writers of many other countries), their truly characteristic impetus is to focus readers' attention on the conflict between white masters and black servitors. As Bernth Lindfors and Reingard Nethersole have shown, South African writers have had a national obsession to describe in committed detail the practical implications of apartheid, and conse quently have produced a literature that is unabashedly didactic. Those who choose to write "metapolitical" fiction are generally attacked as collaborators in injustice.