White writers and Shaka Zulu
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
- Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 1996
- Subjects: Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 In literature Shaka, Zulu Chief, 1787?-1828 Zulu (African people) -- History
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2233 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002276
- Description: The figure of Shaka (c. 1780-1828) looms massively in the historical and symbolic landscapes of Southern Africa. He has been unquestioningly credited, in varying degrees, with creating the Zulu nation, murderous bloodlust, and military genius, so launching waves of violence across the subcontinent (the "mfecane"). The empirical evidence for this is slight and controversial. More importantly, however, Shaka has attained a mythical reputation on which not only Zulu self-conceptions, but to a significant degree white settler self-identifications have been built. This study describes as comprehensively as possible the genealogy of white Shakan literature, including eyewitness accounts, histories, fictions and poetry. The study argues that the vast majority of these works are characterised by a high degree of incestuous borrowing from one another, and by processes of mythologising catering primarily to the social-psychological needs of the writers. So coherent is this genealogy that the formation of an idealised notion of settler identity can be discerned, especially through the common use of particular textual "gestures". At the same time, while conforming largely to unquestioning modes of discourse such as popularised history and romance fiction, individual writers have attempted to adjust to socio-political circumstances; this study includes four close studies of individual texts. Such close stylistic attention serves to underline the textually-constructed nature of both the figure of Shaka and the "selves" of the writers. The study makes no attempt to reduce its explorations to a single Grand Unified Explanation, and takes eclectic theoretical positions, but it does seek throughout to explore the social-psychological meanings of textual productions of Shaka - in short, to explore the question, Why have white writers written about Shaka in these particular ways?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 1996
Unconscious nobility: the animal poetry of Harold Farmer
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6122 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004705
- Description: I want to suggest that Harold Farmer's poetry works repeatedly in this area of ambiguity, a zone of tension triangulated, as it were, between three impulses. First : a notion (or even the fact) that a sense of community depends on 'knowing' what the 'other' is thinking or feeling, and on being able to articulate that knowledge. Second : suspecting, or even knowing, that certain reaches of the mind of the 'other' are fundamentally, and fascinatingly, unknowable - of the realm of the unconscious. And third : knowing (or just fearing or hoping) that any secure distinction between ourselves-as-humans and ourselves-as-sharing-animal-traits is artificial, or at least permeable. Hence, while Farmer's wild animals are perpetually on the brink of disappearing from sight and understanding, it is precisely that mysteriousness which attracts us, can sometimes envelop us, and even speak to us. In having spoken and been spoken to, we are somehow ennobled.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6122 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004705
- Description: I want to suggest that Harold Farmer's poetry works repeatedly in this area of ambiguity, a zone of tension triangulated, as it were, between three impulses. First : a notion (or even the fact) that a sense of community depends on 'knowing' what the 'other' is thinking or feeling, and on being able to articulate that knowledge. Second : suspecting, or even knowing, that certain reaches of the mind of the 'other' are fundamentally, and fascinatingly, unknowable - of the realm of the unconscious. And third : knowing (or just fearing or hoping) that any secure distinction between ourselves-as-humans and ourselves-as-sharing-animal-traits is artificial, or at least permeable. Hence, while Farmer's wild animals are perpetually on the brink of disappearing from sight and understanding, it is precisely that mysteriousness which attracts us, can sometimes envelop us, and even speak to us. In having spoken and been spoken to, we are somehow ennobled.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
The dassie and the hunter: a South African meeting, by Jeff Opland: book review
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6125 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004709
- Description: [From the intoduction]: In this fascinating if not quite fine book Professor Opland, doyen scholar of oral poetries, treads that razor-edged line, devil of all memoirists, between humility and hubris, between open honesty and wallowing in one’s own unavoidability. David Yali-Manisi, the other half of this “South African meeting,” helps Opland out with his almost indefatigably calming, selfcontained, wise and energised presence. The relationship between these two men is an extraordinary, strangely evolving, not always smooth dance through several decades of South African history, politics, and academia. It really is ‘South African’ in the way in which it serves as lightning-rod to so many racial, personal, party-political, and literary currents in our recent past.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6125 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004709
- Description: [From the intoduction]: In this fascinating if not quite fine book Professor Opland, doyen scholar of oral poetries, treads that razor-edged line, devil of all memoirists, between humility and hubris, between open honesty and wallowing in one’s own unavoidability. David Yali-Manisi, the other half of this “South African meeting,” helps Opland out with his almost indefatigably calming, selfcontained, wise and energised presence. The relationship between these two men is an extraordinary, strangely evolving, not always smooth dance through several decades of South African history, politics, and academia. It really is ‘South African’ in the way in which it serves as lightning-rod to so many racial, personal, party-political, and literary currents in our recent past.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
Mongrel: essays, William Dicey
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142748 , vital:38113 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/143393
- Description: If I had the liberty to run an introductory course on South African history, I might well start with William Dicey’s Borderline (2004). Borderline recounts Dicey and some friends’ canoe trip down the Orange River, from Orania to the sea. It’s by turns lyrical and funny, and rich with historical perspectives stimulated by people and places Dicey encounters en route.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142748 , vital:38113 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/143393
- Description: If I had the liberty to run an introductory course on South African history, I might well start with William Dicey’s Borderline (2004). Borderline recounts Dicey and some friends’ canoe trip down the Orange River, from Orania to the sea. It’s by turns lyrical and funny, and rich with historical perspectives stimulated by people and places Dicey encounters en route.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2016
Learning Zulu: a secret history of language in South Africa
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: book review , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255 , vital:27997 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
- Description: Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: book review , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61255 , vital:27997 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/tvl/article/view/160848
- Description: Taking a leaf from the book under review, I’ll start by injecting an autobiographical element. Much of what Sanders examines here echoes my own experience, after Zimbabwe’s independence, of heading to a remote mission school to teach for two years. Part of my purpose was to learn better Shona, the majority language from which I had been systematically discouraged by my colonial education. It was, in a way, a gesture of reparation, or addressing a nagging “white guilt”, or at least of assuaging a sense of fruitless loss and exclusion. I was nowhere near as successful in attaining fluency as Sanders seems have been in learning Zulu; and now that I live in the Eastern Cape, my efforts to learn Xhosa have been similarly patchy and faltering. One thing is evident throughout Sanders’s dense discussions: long-term, assiduous application and pe¬riods of total immersion are vital—and as he points out, few whites in South Africa have carved out the time and energy to do so, while willy-nilly expecting the black majority to learn their language. (An endnote does aver that, according to census figures, a surprising 16,000-plus whites, and a similar number of Indians, in KwaZulu-Natal, list Zulu as their first language.)
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Elephants, compassion, and the largesse of literature
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:582 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018924
- Description: [From the text] Why is it that we do not raise a monument, a mausoleum, nor even a humble gravestone, to mark the death of every elephant? We habitually, even compulsively, do this for other humans, occasionally for treasured pets. Yet we do not do it for the most charismatic, gigantic, culturally resonant land animal we will ever encounter. Why not? Some possible answers. One: too much work. Another: we regard other animals as less conscious than ourselves; we are the only creatures who deserve to have our deaths so commemorated. A third: wild animals are part of wild ecosystems; it is ‘natural’ for them to die and to be reabsorbed namelessly back into those ecosystems. We humans, on the other hand, consider ourselves somehow separate from those ecosystems: we shield ourselves from ‘Nature’ with bricks and literatures while we live, with marble and epitaphs after we die.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Wylie, Dan
- Date: 2011
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:582 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018924
- Description: [From the text] Why is it that we do not raise a monument, a mausoleum, nor even a humble gravestone, to mark the death of every elephant? We habitually, even compulsively, do this for other humans, occasionally for treasured pets. Yet we do not do it for the most charismatic, gigantic, culturally resonant land animal we will ever encounter. Why not? Some possible answers. One: too much work. Another: we regard other animals as less conscious than ourselves; we are the only creatures who deserve to have our deaths so commemorated. A third: wild animals are part of wild ecosystems; it is ‘natural’ for them to die and to be reabsorbed namelessly back into those ecosystems. We humans, on the other hand, consider ourselves somehow separate from those ecosystems: we shield ourselves from ‘Nature’ with bricks and literatures while we live, with marble and epitaphs after we die.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
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