The Culture of South Africa – Our Uuniqueness
The Culture of South Africa – Our Uniqueness – is famous for its ethnic and cultural diversity. The South African majority still has a substantial number of rural inhabitants who lead largely impoverished lives. It is among these people, however, that cultural traditions survive most strongly; as South Africans have become increasingly urbanised and Westernised, aspects of traditional culture have declined. Urban South Africans usually speak English or Afrikaans in addition to their native language. There are smaller but still significant groups of speakers of Khoisan languages, we do not include them in the eleven official languages, but are one of the eight other official languages we recognise.
Members of middle class, who are predominantly white but whose ranks include growing numbers of people of colour, have lifestyles similar in many respects to that of people found in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Members of the middle class often study and work abroad for greater exposure to the markets of the world.
Indian South Africans preserve their cultural heritage, languages and religious beliefs, being either Christian, Hindu or Muslim and speaking English, with Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil or Gujarati that they speak less frequently as second languages. The first Indians arrived on the Truro ship as indentured labourers in Natal to work the Sugar Cane Fields, while the rest arrived as traders. A post-apartheid wave of South Asian (including Pakistani) immigration has also influenced South African Indian culture.
Languages
There are 11 national languages in South Africa. South Africa’s unique social and political history has generated a rich variety of literature’s, with themes spanning pre-colonial life, the days of apartheid, and the lives of people in the “new South Africa”.
Literature and Books
Many of the first black South African print authors were missionary-educated, and many thus wrote in either English or Afrikaans. One of the first well known novels written by a black author in an African language was Solomon Thekiso Plaatje’s Mhudi, written in 1930.
Notable white English-language South African authors include Nadine Gordimer who was, in Seamus Heaney’s words, one of “the guerrillas of the imagination”, and who became the first South African and the seventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. The release of her most famous novel, July’s People, (1981), depicts the collapse of white-minority rule.
Authors
Athol Fugard, whose plays they regularly premiere in fringe theatres in South Africa, London (The Royal Court Theatre), and New York City. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) is a revelation in Victorian literature. Many see it as an introduction of feminism into the novel form.
Alan Paton published the acclaimed novel Cry, the Beloved Country in 1948. He told the tale of a black priest who comes to Johannesburg to find his son. This became an international best-seller. During the 1950s, Drum magazine became a hotbed of political satire, fiction, and essays. It was giving a voice to urban black culture.
Afrikaans-language writers also began to write controversial material. The Government put Breyten Breytenbach in jail for his involvement with the guerrilla movement. And against apartheid. Andre Brink – the first Afrikaner writer receive a ban by the government. This after he released the novel A Dry White Season. It was about a white South African who discovers the truth about a black friend who dies in police custody.
John Maxwell (JM) Coetzee was also first published in the 1970s, and became internationally recognize in 1983 with his Booker Prize-winning novel Life & Times of Michael K. His 1999 novel Disgrace won him his second Booker Prize as well as the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He is also the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.
English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, was born in Bloemfontein in 1892.