HC Bosman

Abstract

Abstract provided by author:

It is argued that Bosman's oeuvre, both in South Africa and internationally, has not yet received the acclaim it deserves: that it represents what is contended to be the very first profound and sustained challenge by any South African writer to the dominant discourse of 'white' South Africa generally, and to that of Afrikaners in particular

If he had followed other South African authors in writing internationally received English, it is suggested that Bosman would already have been recognised as not only the first South African author, but also one of those whose works were in the vanguard of substantive challenges to racism made in, for example, Britain, America and Australia. They constitute a profound questioning of racist attitudes that were not only prevalent in his own country, but to an analogous extent among the majority of European-origin peoples world wide

Bosman deserves to be internationally recognised for this achievement: as the first South African author to profoundly challenge racism throughout his writing life. As yet such recognition has been withheld, and the thesis investigates reasons for this critical neglect

The vast majority of Bosman's works have been published only in his own country, and are written in colloquial South African English, an idiom that is unique in incorporating words and phrases from a number of indigenous languages, especially Afrikaans, and which includes numerous allusions to only locally well- known subject matter. His texts have been neither readily available nor fully comprehensible to those unfamiliar with discourse in customary South African English. They should be seen as equivalent to writings in unadulterated British vernaculars, such as those of the Scots or Irish

In South Africa his writings are popular amongst the general public, and he is especially famous as a 'short story writer'. But in academic circles the negative association of 'popularity' with literary worth, and the relatively low status of the short story genre, combined in South Africa with a lack of what is regarded as necessary recognition overseas, have resulted in the marginalisation of Bosman's oeuvre amongst a majority of the country's literati. Due recognition has also been postponed by the posthumous publication of his last and potentially most significant novel in 1977, 26 years after his death. By that time younger - and internationally-acclaimed - South African writers had made his pioneering anti-racist stance and general questioning of the dominant discourse in South Africa so familiar that it had come to seem unoriginal

Bosman was the first to put the South African English vernacular on the literary map and to write primarily for a South African readership. This was a major paradigmatic departure from the norm of contemporary local writers, who followed that established by earlier ones such as Olive Schreiner; important in South African literary history as author of the first 'colonial novel' to be highly acclaimed in Britain (The Story of an African Farm, 1883). Bosman's use of English, as is explicated in his literary articles, was determined by the desire to stimulate development of a truly South African literary canon that would supplant the contemporary received-English colonial one. In this he acknowledged the stimulus of admired American writers such as Edgar Allen roe, Mark Twain and others, who had already succeeded in doing the equivalent for their country's literary canon

The thesis concludes that recognition of Bosman's works as important and seminal constituents of today's South African literary canon, is long overdue