National Character in South African English Children's Literature

Elwyn Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135869557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-length study of South African English youth literature to cover the entire period of its publication, from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.Jenkins' book focuses on what made the subsequent literature essentially South African and what aspects of the country and its society authors concentrated on. What gives this book particular strength is its coverage of literature up to the 1960s, which has until now received almost no scholarly attention. Not only is this earlier literature a rewarding subject for study in itself, but it also throws light on subsequent literary developments. Another exceptional feature is that the book follows the author's previous work in placing children's literature in the context of adult South African literature and South African cultural history (e.g. cinema). He also makes enlightening comparisons with American, Canadian and Australian children's literature.

1
Country Children

In 1926, Annette Joelson opened a story for children, “In the very heart of the Cape Karoo, which again is the very heart of South Africa, where the sunshine is ever bright and warm, and skies are always blue, there lived a little girl in a very big farm-house, on a very, very big farm.”¹

Until late in the twentieth century, there were only two significant contenders for the spiritual heartland of English-speaking white South Africans: the Karoo, a semidesert region of plains and flat-topped hills covering most of central South Africa, and the bushveld of the north and northeast. Early British writers, relying on their reading, set their adventures in the Karoo. Typically, in 1856 Thomas Mayne Reid wrote The Bush Boys; or, The History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family in the Wild Karoos of Southern Africa.² A century later, its reputation continued in England: an English writer, Jane Shaw, who sends an English family to settle in Johannesburg in Venture to South Africa (1960), has them drive from Cape Town through “the famous Karoo.”³

The South African children’s writers who took over from the British turned the Karoo, or more broadly the wide open veld, with its blazing sky, its droughts, its windmills, its thunderstorms and its veld fires, from a setting into a mystic homeland. The very first full-length children’s novel written by a South African was called The Farm in the Karoo (1883).⁴ Mabel Waugh, author of Verses for Tiny South Africans (1923), apostrophizes it in “The Karroo” (using an alternative spelling):

Great, big, wide Karroo,
How did you get rolled out so flat…
A farm, a kopje, or a windmill
Are the only things higher at all…

And when I stand in the midst of you—oh
Do you know that I feel very small.⁵

Sally Starke gave the title The Young Karoo (1950) to her book of verses reprinted from the Cape Times and opens with the title poem,

Are you young?
How young are you?
Old and ageless,
Broad Karoo?
As young as new veld
Breaking through.⁶

Hers is a theme that was dear to Guy Butler, born in the Karoo and one of its leading poets, who saw the geological ages of Africa as metaphysically interconnected with the youth and vigor of the country’s inhabitants.⁷

Maude Bidwell wrote a children’s fantasy called Breath of the Veld (1923) that was clearly inspired by the allegories Dreams (1890) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893) by Olive Schreiner, the most celebrated writer of the Karoo. She opens with the dedication:

Sweet memories are writ across my heart
And of my very being form a part
Of thee, beloved Veld.⁸

The archetypal passage is to be found in the boy’s story Backveld Born (1943) by E. Owen Wright, whose credentials are sworn to in the foreword by another writer whose name is synonymous with the veld, Leonard Flemming, author of such books as The Call of the Veld (1924): “He was born and bred and brought up on a remote farm in the heart of the backveld — in the lonely Karoo.”⁹ Wright enthuses in a meditation by the boy hero on his feelings on entering the school chapel:

One felt that way when alone on the vast Karroo veld silvered by the bright, aloof moon; and when the soft dawn breeze and the blushing East awakened the languid veld choir to herald the coming sun; and, perhaps most, when a scorching summer sun had climbed to the highest point of the steel blue heavens, had hushed the voices of the veld, stilled the winds, and made the very plants bow down their heads. The vastness, the aloneness, the silence, held one in thrall, dwarfed one’s body, hushed one’s voice, magnified one’s spirit, and set it free to roam the vast unpeopled veld, to soar through the clear, sunwashed air of the Karroo days, and to mingle with the burnished stars of the haunting Karroo nights.

(Backveld, 119)

A wider view of the South African landscape was presented by Juliet Konig (who later wrote as Juliet Marais Louw) in her much admired collection of verse, South Wind (1945). The prefatory poem extends to the Cape coast and tropical Indian Ocean shore, but the Karoo still takes center stage:

The Southwind sings—
It brings a song
Of sunbaked lands where the grass is long,
Of sundried rivers and sunflecked seas
And scarlet flowers on tropical trees;
Little lost towns in the silent heat
Where children play in the dusty street;
Farms forgotten and far away,
Lonely huts, where the black folk stay;
Sunward ever the vulture wings,
These are the songs
The Southwind brings.¹⁰

The Karoo and the veld dotted with Free State koppies (the A frikaans/English word for hills, also spelled kopje) were not entirely empty. Part of the allure was the cosy life on the farms, which Konig describes in her poems: fruit bottling, making butter, baking, and meal times.

Lights

Here and there on the veld at night
Fitfully gleams a little lost light.

Every light in the wintry gloom
Is a lamp in a dim, low-ceilinged room,

Which shines on tables and forks and knives
And supper for farmers and farmer’s wives.

(South Wind, 41)

Many of her poems describe black people at work or in their homes.

Huts

Huts in the hills, huts in the hills,
Makanda says there’s nothing fills
His heart, like the huts in the rolling hills,
Where his wife, with a little brown boy on her back,
Swings up the long, pink cattle-track.

(South Wind, 13)

Compared with most of her white contemporaries, who thoughtlessly wrote about black people in racist language and clichés, her writing is always humane:

Shepherd Boys

The moon is rising,
The hills are steep,
Piccanin
Is watching the sheep.

Squats in the firelight
All night long,
Twangs his fiddle
And sings a song.

Just the same
When the moon was low,
And the cedars shadowy
Long ago,

Red-cheeked David,
The shepherd’s son,
Sang in the shadow
Of Lebanon.

Led his sheep
By silent streams,
Plucked his harp
And dreamed his dreams.

(South Wind, 18)

Juliet (Konig) Marais Louw was one of the most respected women of letters in children’s literature in South Africa in the twentieth century. She wrote in English, although German had been her mother tongue as a child. As well as writing poetry, novels, plays, history and autobiography, she broadcast on radio programs for children and coedited influential school poetry anthologies that introduced children to local writers and gave prominence to women writers. Some of her books were translated into Xhosa and Afrikaans. She also had an international awareness: as early as 1945 she published a volume of verse about the children of the Holocaust. She is the only children’s writer to have been awarded the Gold Medal of the English Academy of Southern Africa. She died in 2001 at the age of 91.

The farm buildings that writers liked to describe were rondavels — round buildings usually situated in the farm yard and traditionally occupied by schoolboys during the holidays. They were probably favorites because of both their design and their name, which were uniquely South African: “The big rondavel was built of stone, and thatched. It was a cosy room.”¹¹

The traditional African huts on which they were based, round and with conical roofs, featured often in texts and illustrations, but sometimes more for stimulating fantasy than realistic consideration of the occupants: Sally Starke named her book about toadstools that fairies build in the night Little Huts That Grow in the Veld (1943),¹² and Norah Perkins wrote a poem about

Three brown thatched huts, rondavels of the south,
Looking like giant mushrooms in the dusk….¹³

Far less often a setting for children’s stories and verse were country villages, or dorps, Juliet Konig’s “Little lost towns in the silent heat,/ Where children play in the dusty street.” Detailed descriptions of towns and their buildings are rare. In Children of the Camdeboo, C.M. Stimie, writing in 1964, captures precisely a type of school architecture dating back to the First World War that was ubiquitous across the country.¹⁴ Camdeboo High School takes its name from the ancient Khoi name for a region of the Karoo, and its signs date from the time before Afrikaans replaced High Dutch in the 1920s.

It was a single storey with a wide, high front, a steep red corrugated roof and an entrance on either side. The bottom part of the walls was of dressed hard sandstone common in the area, the rest of bricks, plastered and whitewashed. Above each entrance there was a mock Cape Dutch gable from which the cream-coloured paint was peeling in ugly blotches. On the left gable, as one approached, huge letters spelt out the word “CAMDEBOO” with below it, in smaller lettering, “BOYS – JONGENS.” The gable on the right was decorated with the words “HIGH SCHOOL – HOGERE SKOOL” and below these, again in smaller letters, “GIRLS – MEISJES.”

(Camdeboo, 39)

This is the Cape Dutch architectural style which is singled out for illustration in the title page frame for Juta’s Juvenile Library. (See Figure 1.) It was what white people considered for three centuries and more to be the most important South African style.

Edith King’s poem, “The Stoep,” from her collection Veld Rhymes for Children, written in Bloemfontein in 1911, is also true of many a dorp:

Of all the places in the house
We love the stoep the best;
It is a bowery sitting-room,
Where all the choicest flowers bloom,
And there’s a swallow’s nest....
A creeper, like a curtain, shades
From sun and dust and heat:
It is a cosy place for tea;
No prying passer-by can see
When walking down the street.¹⁵

While the interior plateau of South Africa continued unabated as a setting until the 1960s, the Bushveld gradually gained popularity among children’s writers. In children’s literature,“Bushveld” refers specifically to the Lowveld of what is now the province of Mpumalanga, rather than broadly the countryside of the extreme north and northeast of South Africa, which also sometimes bears this name.¹⁶ It is the setting of one of the favorite books of English-speakers, considered by many to be the only South African children’s classic: Jock of the Bushveld, by Sir Percy FitzPatrick (1907).¹⁷ Encouraged by his friend Rudyard Kipling, who overheard him telling his children bedtime stories of his adventures, FitzPatrick wrote this semi-fictionalized account, recalling his experiences as a young man with his dog, traveling by wagon and shooting wild animals in what is now partly the Kruger National Park. Subsequent writers for children make intertextual reference to it, expecting their young readers to appreciate the tradition it established.

The significance of the Bushveld was that it represented the primeval unspoilt African continent as it had been in ancient times, when the land swarmed with animals. It lay on the edge of South Africa, as Werner Heyns suggests in the opening of his story of an African boy who lives there, Ramini of the Bushveld (1963): “In a far, far corner of the Bushveld, where the Klaserie River makes a big bend, there lived a herd of seven elephant.”¹⁸ Only as the Lowveld became more accessible to visitors, especially after the Kruger National Park opened in 1926, did the Bushveld become an alternative setting for children’s stories, parallel with adult fiction and nonfiction about it. The sociopolitical background to this development is considered in Chapter 3.

Other settings for children’s books were scattered around the country, oft en apparently chosen because of their familiarity to the writer, but sometimes arbitrary. Yvonne Jooste, for example, began a story cal...