The Four Modes of Drum: Popular Fiction and Social Control in South Africa

Extract

Literature is both an object and an agent of social control. Not only is it shaped by social constraints, but it is also a constraint on society. Ezekiel Mphahlele (1962: 186), the South African writer, has lamented the effect of society on literature in his homeland:

During the last twenty years the political, social climate of South Africa has been growing viciously difficult for a non-white to write in. It requires tremendous organization of one's mental and emotional faculties before one can write a poem or a novel or a play. This has become all but impossible…[At one time,] oppression provided just a sufficient spur to adult creative writing. The spur is a paralysing one today. Although the short story is very demanding, it is often used as a short-cut to prose meaning. And so it has become the most common medium in African literary activity, barring the large volume of vernacular writing being produced for school use.

Oppression constrains not only the structure of literature but also its content. Mphahlele suggests that the short story in such a racist setting goes through three stages: romance or escape, then protest, and finally irony. He calls irony “the meeting point of acceptance and rejection in the broadest terms: acceptance and protest in specific areas of black-white relations within implicit acceptance in a larger area” (Mphahlele, 1962: 188).