Abstract
One of the products of the Black Consciousness Movement, in addition to its establishment of a black identity in South Africa, was a consciousness of the ideological function of literature in maintaining the hegemony of the ruling group in the society — a consciousness, that is, not among professional critics and theorists, but among the writers themselves. Black writers, by their questionings and experiments with form and genre, were able to lay bare the naturalising processes at work in accepted literary forms and genres (usually of western derivation) which contributed to their people’s subjugation, and to establish a search for alternatives that would counteract the cultural onslaught of white domination and serve the evolution of an ideology geared to the needs and aims of a black proletariat and rural population.
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Notes
Miriam Tlali, Amandla (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980) p. 230.
Sipho Sepamla, A Ride on the Whirlwind (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1981) p. 32.
Ibid., p. 34.
Mbulelo Mzamane, The Children of Soweto: a Trilogy (Harlow: Longman, 1982) p. 77.
Ibid., p. 86.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 151.
Ibid., p. 244.
Mbulelo Mzamane, ‘The Uses of Traditional Oral Forms in Black South African Literature’ in Landeg White and Tim Couzens (eds), Literature and Society in South Africa (Harlow: Longmans, 1984) pp. 147–8.
Ibid.
Mongane Serote, To Every Birth Its Blood (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1981) p. 1.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 70.
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 79.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 162.
Ibid., p. 173.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 322.
Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation in Modern Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) p. 63.
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© 1989 Jane Watts
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Watts, J. (1989). The Literature of Combat. In: Black Writers from South Africa. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20244-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20244-7_6
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