Poets in The Colonial Era
While it has been recorded that literature by black South Africans only emerged in the 20th century, this is only a reflection of published works at the time, not of the reality that black South Africans were writing and reciting in oral forms. The first generation of mission-educated African writers sought to restore dignity to Africans by invoking and reconstructing a heroic African past.
Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo’s iconic works preached a "return to the source" or the wisdom of finding traditional ways of dealing with modern problems. His works included several plays and the long poem The Valley of a Thousand Hills (1941). Poets such as BW Vilakazi gave new literary life to their aboriginal languages, combining the traditional influence of Zulu oral praise poetry (izibongo) with that of the influence of English poets such as Keats, Shelley, Dunbar, Cotter, Gray and Goldsmith] (some of whose poetry he translated into Zulu). Herman Charles Bosman, is best known for his Unto Dust and In the Withaak's Shade capturing a portrait of Afrikaner storytelling skills and social attitudes. Bosman also wrote poetry, with a predominantly satirical tone.
Read more about this topic: South African Poetry
Famous quotes containing the words poets in, poets, colonial and/or era:
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The poets were not alone in sanctioning myths, for long before the poets the states and the lawmakers had sanctioned them as a useful expedient.... They needed to control the people by superstitious fears, and these cannot be aroused without myths and marvels.”
—Strabo (c. 58 B.C.–c. 24 A.D., Greek geographer. Geographia, bk. 1, sct. 2, subsct. 8.
“The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There’s very little difference between a dead Swede and a young man who’s had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)