A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature Part two: The Period of Emancipation

Koch’s A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature, Part 2 is an extensive and thorough study of the development of Afrikaans literature during the first three decades of the 20th century. It follows Part 1, in which the earlier origins of Afrikaans and Afrikaans literature as well as the local Dutch writings tradition were discussed. Koch uses the metaphor of mapping to describe the work of the historiographer, and it becomes clear that his study analyses the literary texts within the context of space and time. Accordingly, it includes information on the authors’ lives and times as well as the developments in Afrikaans literature, criticism and literary historiography.
The exposition starts with the origin and development of the Afrikaans language during the so-called ‘Second Language Movement’. Koch also describes the polemics between historians emphasising the ‘spontaneous development’ of Afrikaans from Dutch and those regarding it as a creole language; his balanced conclusion is that neither of the two groups can lay absolute claim to the truth.
The interest of the book is heightened by the inclusion of texts written in Dutch, as Koch discussed in Part 1, and also works which are not ‘literary’ in the strict sense of the word, like war diaries. These are discussed not primarily for their literary value but for the insights they provide into the effect of the Anglo-Boer War on the formation of Afrikaner identity. It confirms that this literary history does not isolate the development of Afrikaans literature from the development of Afrikaner ideology and identity.
This is followed by the two main parts of the study: a discussion of the literary works of the ‘first generation’ (Celliers, Totius and Leipoldt) and those of the ‘writers of the twenties’ (Toon van den Heever, A G Visser, C J Langenhoven and Eugène Marais).
Jerzy Koch is professor in the Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Faculty of English, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, research fellow at the Free State University, Bloemfontein, and extraordinary professor at Stellenbosch University. He is an acclaimed translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature into Polish and has published widely on Dutch and post-colonial literature.