Notes and NewsConference of The English Academy ofSouthern Africa, 1969The conference was held at Rhodes Universityin July 1969 and its theme was South AfricanWriting in English. The proceedings which havebeen published1 show that it was a conference ofvaried purposes: a stocktaking was held of wh^tachievement could be said to exist in SouthAfrican English (with a glance at the state ofaffairs in Nigerian and Afrikaans writing), a con-sideration was given to the sparse bibliographicaland lexicographical aids to the study of the field,and various teachers and lecturers gave opinionas to the place, if any, that could be given toSouth African works in the sadly limited syllabiof schools and universities.In many ways the papers given by school teach-ers in the Schools' Symposium are the most valu-able. Inevitably the subject is broadened in thissection to the general problem of encouragingthe school dhild to read widely and with dis-crimination. The problems in these fields havealways been severe but the feeling arises fromthe papers given that they are being tackled in anintelligent and vigorous manner, at least by thosein position of educational authority. There is afear however that it will be a long time beforetheir approach will make itself felt at all levels.Perhaps the most valuable contribution in thissection is that of the Chief Education Planner inthe Department of Bantu Education, Mr. K. B.Hartsthorne; his paper on English Literature inBantu Schools sadly demonstrates that forideological and cultural reasons South Africanwriting is practically unusable in African schools.Nevertheless, more hearteningly, it appeared thatsome of the central classics of English literature,even if studied by means of simplified and abridgededitions in the lower forms, are far more usefulthan is generally admitted. In his final noteHartsthorne states that Shakespeare, for all hislinguistic difficulty, is, with his kingship, kinship,and magical beliefs, most relevant to the African.The present writer can support this view fromhis own experience, and it is a point which cannotbe made too often.At various times it emerged that the racialproblems of South Africa and Africa complicatedthe universal problem of encouraging students toread. Professor N. Sabbegha, Head of Depart-ment of English at the University of Pretoria,discussed English South African writing set forAfrikaans students, and concluded that:Upbringing and environment are responsiblefor preconceptions and preconditioned responsesthat may hamper both the understanding andthe appreciation of what has to be read . . .I was taken aback when the wife of a colleaguetold me that one of her sons resented havingto read Pauline Smith for examinations as hewas convinced that Pauline Smith was pokingfun at the pastoral type of Afrikaner, and moreespecially at his manner of speech ... I experi-enced the embarrassment of having to reply to79a letter from a senior English teacher at anAfrikaans High School who deplored the pre-scribing of H. C. Bosnian's Mafeking Roadthat year, 'The writer*, he said, 'presents theAfrikaner as ignorant, uncivilized, dishonest,fond of drink, lazy and comfort-loving', butwhat distressed him most was 'that the writerhad no respect even for the Afrikaner'sreligion',2For an English-speaking reader at least PaulineSmith and Bosnian show an almost propagandistregard for the Afrikaner and his way of life.Professor Povey of the University of California,Los Angeles, touched in passing, on the sameproblem in his paper, 'Styles and Themes in theAfrican Novel in. English'. Discussing the styleof Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drunkard heremarks:We know that he had a minimal educationand there is a sense in which it can be assertedthat his style reflects incompetence, mere'mistakes'. This was argued with asperity byAfricans who claimed that Faber's publicationwith such minimal editorial correction wasaimed at confirming 'international audiences intheir superior belief of the African as a quaintand illiterate story teller'.5Such cultural preconceptions, so completely un-related to the problems raised in itself by a liter-ary text can cause more harm to the writing andreading of literature in Africa as a whole possiblyeven than the censorship of governments. Poveysignificantly recalls that 'when Dylan Thomascalled it "a fresh young English" in a review healso spoke the truth", and he goes on to arguethat Tutuola's style represents a mine of futurepossibility for the idiom of the Nigerian novel.The core of the papers represents an attempt toassess what already existed in the field. The firstpaper was that of Professor R. Sands, Head ofthe Department of English at the University ofNatal, which was on the South African novel inEnglish, Tf at times the paper is unduly flippantand arch, its effect is salutary and it was unfor-tunate that the remaining papers failed to reachits standard of critical astringency. ProfessorSands pointed out that the English novel, itself hasperhaps not attained the splendours of the Frenchor Russian novels; bearing this in mind he furtherdemonstrated that the South African offshoot ofthe English novel was small and desperatelyminor. In this perspective the subject of his paperwas shown as being very small beer indeed.If this demonstration of the minor nature ofSouth African writing in English is a demonstra-tion of the obvious, it is an obviousnessthat Sands' fellow lecturers tended to obscure.In his evaluation he allowed for a certainamount of competent talent and offered threehostages to fortune. The Beadle by Pauline Smith,The Story of a South African Farm by OliveSohreiner and Too Late the Phalarope by AlanPa'ton. In the last two named novels even hiscritical faculty has been beguiled as they offerprecious little apart from 'local colour', but it ispossible he shied back from so radical a demoli-tion. The Beadle remains the one novel in thefield which could be included in a Universitycourse on purely literary grounds and Sands failsto give due credit to its economy of style andbeautifully controlled emotion. Nevertheless hispaper remains a lone effort to apply standards ofreal critical rigour to the field covered by theconference; for after him there comes a ruthlesshunt for masterpieces. Mr. D. Madennan of theDepartment of English, Rhodes University, in hispaper, 'The South African Short Story' providesa valuable survey of a surprisingly vast fieldwhich would be invaluable to any prospectiveresearch student. The South African short storydoes contain a small amount of creditable workand it is well sign-posted. One does feel howeverthat a vast critical apparatus including ideasdrawn from the 'Death of God Theology',Kierkegaard and Hegelian Dialectics (odd bed-fellows) is like using a telescope to study a butter-fly, but this is a circumstance found in otherpapers in a far more dangerous form.If the prose writing is well served, it isunfortunately not the case with the verse. Theneed to find excellence when nothing of excellenceis being produced causes some very strange con-tortions. Professor R. Beeton, Head of Depart-ment of English at the University of South Africa,in a paper entitled 'Concern and Evocation: SomeAspects of South African English Poetry sincethe War', is able to demonstrate little realizedconcern or genuine evocation in the exampleshe discusses. It is true that he discovers anddirects the reader to a certain amount of pleasingminor verse but the reader becomes suspiciouswhen he encounters a passage such as the follow-ing:80. . . Wopko Jensma, in the poem that follows,brutalizes his speech in order to arrest elo-quence:i got a gash in my headblood spurts from iti must cut my head offi must hide myselfno one must see me do itcause the blood is my guilti cant stop the blooda force behind the bloodtears all bandages offi tried it many timesin the dark of my roomi am very weak nowdue to loss of bloodi only have my agony nowi must cut my head offand replace it witha shining conscience'Conscience' has a coarse sting in it, and itsshine an angry fluorescence. Whether here wecan believe 'evil itself were beautiful' is muchopen to question. The whole thing is ugly,awkward, uncomfortable (though 'due to lossof blood' is an indication of its invertedrhetoric). But if beauty has not been createdwhat has? Its power is not heroic, its pain iscrudely actual ... If not beauty, is it poetry?I think it is in the vigour that vises truncatedphrasing to expose its concern, to image itshorror. And there is in the thing its own under-statement. No names have been called: a rudeanguish has acted itself out. 'My country hasgiven me flint for a soul' Sidney Clouts makesRoy Kloof declare in a much praised line: andyet, I suggest, how much greater the horror ofJensma's 'shining conscience', which reflectsboth the agony of its conception, and theopposite of its insight.4From the remarks quoted above and othersscattered in his paper we are to deduce thatBeeton would give the poem a political connota-tion; although to do so he must have access toinformation extraneous to the poem itself becausethere is nothing in the text to suggest a politicalor any connotation at all. Indeed any criticalreading of the poem leads to the conclusion thatit is being held up for our esteem for precisely thevirtues it lacks. The point is surely, as is admitted,that the poem is ugly, it does not realize or inany way criticize the unpleasant things; it simplyis them. At best it is a nightmare, a chunk, un-fashioned and jagged, of what we are asked totake for pain thrown before the reader with nointernal clue as to any real meaning. 'Guilt' is alittle word but it needs much definition drawnfrom actual human living and as it rests beforeus it is expected to do the job of poetry. Forthis reason, among others, the reader is left quiteuniilumined as to what a 'shining conscience'might be. The horror is there only in the night-mare and in the poverty of the poem. Effectiveas nightmares may be to their percipients theymust be related to and understood and judged interms of a broader context of human experiencebefore 'they gain any significance as poetry.The only poetry quoted by Beeton that willinspire the reader to further acquaintance withtheir author's other work are the poems quotedof Francis Sinclair and Oswald Mtashli. Theseat ieast have the virtues of naivete and unpreten-tiousness that the other example lacks. If the paperof Beeton showed grave lapses in critical judge-ment, the one by Miss Harriett, of the Depart-ment of English. Rhodes University, entitled'New Voices' must surely rank as one of the mostextraordinary papers ever delivered to anacademic gathering and is unworthy of detailedanalysis. It is devoted to two poets. Elias Paterand Charles Oiliiers. and is full of empty criticaljargon devoted to abysmal poems of which care-ful reading reveals the unworthiness of the secondglance that Harriett so elaborately asks.The paper on South African Drama in Englishby Mr. M. Woodrow of the Department ofEnglish at the University of Pretoria has beenpublished separately as a supplement in 1970 toEnglish studies in Africa. Tt is entertaining andinformative on an obscure subject, H. W. D.Manson was perhaps praised too greatly; on theother hand, his analysis of the work of AtholFugard is well balanced. It is indeed a pity thatno other mention of Fugard exists in the pub-lished proceedings, as the conference had theprivilege of seeing a production of his playBoesman and Lena: not only was it the mosteffective production seen at the conference (therewere poetry readings and the like), but is alsoconvinced that a voice was being heard in theSouth African theatre both authoritative andpowerful. Fugard has created a theatre based onSouth African experience and using the idiomsof her speech which has already commandedattention in America and England and is ofgenuine theatrical and literary merit.81Other papers were delivered in order to placeEnglish writing in South Africa in the widercontext of writing in Africa. Professor R.Antonissen, Head of the Department of Afri-kaans at Rhodes University, contributed a paperentitled 'Facets of Contemporary AfrikaansLiterature', and Professor J. Povey one on'Styles and Themes in the African Novel inEnglish'. The latter, except for a passing refer-ence, is devoted entirely to the Nigerian Novelbut as it is in Nigeria that the major efflorescencehas occurred this is fair enough. Antonissen'spaper is a survey of surprisingly large and inter-esting field and is both critical and scholarly. Theportrait of modern Afrikaans writing that emergesis one of some turmoil, a great deal of experi-mental writing influenced by continental modes,and a penetrating desire to evaluate Afrikaansexperience in terms of the general human predica-ment. Though one feels that Antonissen tends toexalt work that is merely precocious, it is insuch an atmosphere as he describes that majorworks can be written. Sometimes, however, hesuffers from an overly florid style already notedin other contributors:Ingrid Jonker's poems in Rook en Oker(1963) and Kantelson (1966) are a ritualaimed at perpetuating without respite an inter-play of reality and illusion, at creating anjllusionary reality in order to make the worldinhabitable for the deeply wounded self. Tt isa continuous double-play for love, seeminglylighthearted sometimes, but in fact alwayspassionate and of terrifying gravity: a double-play for love unto death, when in the end theself loses its grip on the very illusion of love,and everything disintegrates. Everythingtopples over towards terror in a disrupted uni-verse; in which also South Africa stands outsharply as a loveless and senseless lie.5The sensitive unhappy verses of Miss Jonker areminor in their excellence and hardly ask for sodramatic an advertisement. Povey is equallyscholarly and not florid. Briefly summed up histhesis represents a hope that a new and powerfulNigerian novel will envolve as a synthesis of al-ready existing forms. The major achievement ofAchebe in dealing with village life before andduring the coming of westernization has by itsvery finality left only the possibility of an imita-tion of ever-decreasing power. The novels ofBkwenzi while melodramatic and deeply influ-enced in style by Mickey Spillane in the presentwriter's view, have opened up the field of modernNigerian urban life which is rich in possibility.On the other hand Tutuola, illiterate as much ofhis style may be, has opened up for use the idiomof Nigerian English with its strong influence ofvernacular tongues. These possibilities he sees asbeing synthesized into a new and vital novel.Other papers are very much by way of beingbits and pieces. Dr. R. M. Musicker, DeputyLibrarian of Rhodes University, informs us of thedesperately poor bibliographical resources avail-able to the would-be student of South AfricanEnglish. Professor L. Lanham, head of theDepartment of Linguistics at the University ofthe Witwatersrand, in an informative and fascin-ating paper discusses 'South African English as anIndex of Social Change', and demonstrates farmore of the life and values of the English speak-ing South African than much of the literaturediscussed. It shows alarmingly how the adoptionof a markedly South African accent among theyouth shows a decline in 'goal expectancy' anda desire to appear 'tough' to their 'peer group'.Mr. M. Durham of the Department of EducationRhodes University, discusses the interesting resultsobtained by encouraging school pupils in verserather than prose composition. The results hequotes are certainly impressive not only from thepoint of view of self-expression but also of merit.In their spontaneity they put to shame many ofthe works quoted and lauded at the conference.Professor Butler, Head of the Department ofEnglish at Rhodes University, magisterially dis-cusses the diaries of some 1820 settlers. The effectand interest of these neglected pieces is trulyremarkable, their muse is largely unlettered andyet their experiences, simply and directly told, aremoving. While these diaries may be of moreinterest to the historian and antiquarian than tothe student of literature, their virtues alreadymentioned could profitably be enjoined to modernSouth African writers. Professor E. Callan of theUniversity of Kaiamazoo outlines the Americaninterest in Butler's subject and makes a plea thatmore explanatory and linguistic keys of SouthAfrican texts should be made available to facili-tate American research.At the end there is a summing up of the utilityof South African English writing to a Universitysyllabus. Sabbagha in a paper already notedexplains the peculiar problems of presenting suchwriting to Afrikaans speaking students. Profes-sor P. Segal of the University of the Witwaters-82rand and Professor J. Leighton of the RandAfrikaans University took a very stern view. Atuniversities we have only three years in which toacquaint students with English literature. It isa desperately short time, even in a single sub-ject honours degree, and if Shakespeare andMilton do not infuse an enthusiasm for literatureand a deeper perception of experience, an inferiorwork with local interest', will not do the trick.Leighton summed it up succinctly:I know of no poet whose work surpassesthe work of Spenser and Dryden (both ofwhom I omit for lack of space), and whosework could with justice replace the works ofthose whom I feel I must prescribe if I am toachieve my aim of providing a picture ofsome of the great moments in English Cultureas it is reflected in creative writing.6They also felt that a University was perhapsnot the place to stimulate creative writing orstimulate an indigenous literary culture. Segalfelt such an attempt erroneous and artificial andremarked:Neither Shakespeare nor Plomer nor Keatsnor Pauline Smith went to a University. De-partments of English are of a pretty recentfoundation, yet, somehow, English literaturegot itself written.7In some ways it was a sombre but correctconclusion. Nevertheless at the conference viewswere aired and information imparted; this canonly be of value. Somehow South AfricanEnglish literature will have to get itself written.REFERENCES1. South African Writing in English and its place in School and University: Proceedings of the Conference of theEnglish Academy of Southern Africa held at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 7-1 lth July, 1969. English Studiesin Africa, 1970, 13, 1-300. The poetry readings which the writer did not attend have also been published andare reviewed below, pp. XXXXX.2. IBID., 182.3. IBID., 209.4. IBID., 127-8 quoting from Ophir, 6. ix. 1968, 16, and One Life, Cape Town, Purnell, p. 11.5. Proceedings, 199-200. Both volumes are published by the Afrikaans Pers Boekhandel, and a translation SelectedPoems has been published by Jonathan Cape.6. IBID., 187.7. IBID., 179.University of RhodesiaD. F. MIDDLETONConference of the South African Instituteof International Affairs, 1970The conference was held in June 1970 at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburgand was devoted to 'The Impact on InternationalRelations of the Population Explosion'.The subjects of discussion ranged widely, but ofparticular interest to readers of Zambezia was theprovocative paper on the economic and otherimplications of population growth in Africa, givenby Professor G. M. E. Leistner of the Universityof South Africa. He concluded that the most ex-plosive factor is the increasing number of unem-ployed and relatively poor young men and theUniversity of Rhodesiatendency for political and social disputes toarrange themselves around tribal interests. Onthe one hand, in urban areas tribal differencestend to become obscured and so create the begin-ning of a real proletariat. On the other hand,differences between the relatively well-off Africanand his poorer compatriot tend to be blurred bythe fact of the latter's participation, throughfamily, and tribal loyalties, in the former'swealth. The political implications of these factorsis being accentuated by the increasing individuali-zation of the urban African and an 'excellentrevolutionary potential' is being created.F. CLIFFORD-VAUGHAN83