Language and literature in Ethiopia

30/08/2022

The Omotic languages, chief among which is Walaita, are not widespread, being spoken mostly in the densely populated areas of the extreme southwest. The Nilotic language group is native to the Western Lowlands, with Kunama speakers being dominant.
Under the constitution, all Ethiopian languages enjoy official state recognition. However, Amharic is the “working language” of the federal government; together with Oromo, it is one of the two most widely spoken languages in the country. In the 1990s ethnolinguistic differences were used as the basis for restructuring Ethiopia’s administrative divisions.

30/08/2022

The most prominent Cush*tic languages are Oromo, Somali, and Afar. Oromo is native to the western, southwestern, southern, and eastern areas of the country. Somali is dominant among inhabitants of the Ogaden and Hawd, while Afar is most common in the Denakil Plain.

30/08/2022

The Semitic languages are spoken primarily in the northern and central parts of the country; they include Geʿez, Tigrinya, Amharic, Gurage, and Hareri. Geʿez, the ancient language of the Aksumite empire, is used today only for religious writings and worship in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Tigrinya is native to the northeastern part of the country. Amharic is one of the country’s principal languages and is native to the central and northwestern areas. Gurage and Hareri are spoken by relatively few people in the south and east.

30/08/2022

Ethnic groups and languages
Ethiopia: Ethnic composition
Ethiopia: Ethnic composition
Ethiopians are ethnically diverse, with the most important differences on the basis of linguistic categorization. Ethiopia is a mosaic of about 100 languages that can be classified into four groups. The vast majority of languages belong to the Semitic, Cush*tic, or Omotic groups, all part of the Afro-Asiatic language family. A small number of languages belong to a fourth group, Nilotic, which is part of the Nilo-Saharan language family.

30/08/2022

There are between 45 and 86 languages spoken in Ethiopia. Amharic is the government's official language and a widely used lingua franca, but as of 2007, only 29% of the population reported speaking Amharic as their main language. Oromo is spoken by over a third of the population as their main language and is the most widely spoken primary language in Ethiopia. Speakers of certain languages are concentrated in specific regions. Tigrinya is the primary language for over 95% of the population in Tigray, and Afar is the primary language for over 89% of the population of the Afar region.

15/04/2022

The early 15th century saw the translation of several apocalyptic books, which inspired two original compositions. Fekkare Iyasus (“Elucidation of Jesus”) was written during the reign of Tewodros I (1411–14); “Mystery of Heaven and Earth” was written somewhat later and is noteworthy for a vigorous account of the struggle between the archangel Michael and Satan. This book must not be confused with another original work of the same period, the “Book of Mystery” by Giorgis of Sagla, a refutation of heresies. The large hymnals and antiphonaries called Deggua, Mawaseʾet, and Meʾraf also probably dated from this time, though some of the anthems may be older. Another type of religious poetry first composed during the 15th century was the malkʾe (“likeness”), consisting generally of about 50 five-line rhyming stanzas, each addressed to a different physical or moral attribute of the saint apostrophized. As a last example of the religious literature of the “golden age” may be mentioned the “Miracles of Mary,” translated from Arabic in 1441–42; it was enormously popular and went through several recensions, or critical revisions.
During the Muslim incursion of 1527–43, Ethiopian literary activity ceased and many manuscripts were destroyed; Islamization was widespread, and, even after the repulsion of the invaders, the country never fully recovered. A Muslim merchant who had been converted to Christianity and, as Enbaqom (Habakkuk), became prior of the monastery of Debre Libanos, wrote Anqasʾa amin (“Gate of Faith”) to justify his conversion and to persuade apostates to recant. Other similar works were produced, and several were written to defend the miaphysite branch of the Christian faith. Meanwhile the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries constituted a further danger to the Ethiopian Orthodox church.

15/04/2022

Ethiopia represents a challenging environment for children’s literacy and creating a reading culture. There are more than 50 million children and young people under 18 (the US has only 74 million), and is children are taught in primary school in 12 mother tongue languages. Although the government has been rapidly expanding the education system at all levels and literacy rates are rising, the real power of literacy and self-education comes from having access to plenty to read.
Unfortunately, there are few, small publishers, very few titles published, few bookstores, no public libraries and so almost no books in local languages – even Amharic, the national language – available for children and young people. Ethiopia has never been colonized, so English / French / Portuguese do not have the large role in education that exist in most other African countries, although children do study some subjects (e.g. science) in English in higher grades. Most of the books available in the few libraries for the young in Ethiopia are donated English language books, which hold little interest for younger children, and no stories about their own world.
After various experiments and projects around publishing local language books, books, Ethiopia Reads has recently launched local language books as a new program, and current has two major projects:
Becoming a supportive partner to local children’s publishers and the book industry: we believe that there will not be enough attractive children’s books in Ethiopia until there are many children’s publishers that are supported by local buyers, whether parents, relatives, school libraries or government. Ethiopia Reads has been a constant purchaser of local language books since it started the first children’s library in Ethiopia in 2003, but is frustrated by the lack of availability and quality. Over the next few years we will be seeking to grow our budgets to allow us to purchase more locally published books for our libraries, and become a source of knowledge and knowhow for others seeking to set up children’s libraries.
Printing and distributing local language early readers to Ethiopian schools: Ethiopia Reads is already also partnering with Ready Set Go Books, founded by our Co-founder Jane Kurtz, and supported by Open Hearts Big Dreams, who are creating a series of attractive, culturally-connected, illustrated story books which will be available to be published in multiple Ethiopia languages. Ethiopia Reads plans to print and distribute more than 100,000 copies of 20 titles in at least three Ethiopian languages during 2018.
Advocacy and Partnerships: we will participate actively in the Ethiopian children’s books community to advocate for and support children’s publishers, writers, illustrators and book distribution as resources allow.

15/04/2022

Coins datable to the fourth and fifth centuries already show errors in their Greek legends. A few inscriptions were drafted in several versions; Greek, and in Ge`ez in two redactions, the first in the Ge`ez script, the second in the South Arabian script. Use of this `pseudo-Sabaean’ seems to have been mere vanity, perhaps trying to equal the tri-lingual inscriptions set up by the Sassanian kings of Persia, since there can hardly have been any real reason for rendering a Ge`ez inscription into the South Arabian monumental script. Presumably, a native speaker of Ge`ez would be able to recognize the gist of the text, the letters, though differently oriented and more rectilinear, being still recognizable; but a Ge`ez version was also supplied. A visiting South Arabian would have understood the script but not the language. The South Arabian script might perhaps have retained something of a sacrosanct aura, as the ancient vehicle for dedicatory inscriptions, so that it was felt that a version in that script fulfilled the requirements of tradition; but that seems a little far-fetched as an explanation by the time of Kaleb and W`ZB. When king Kaleb of Aksum received Greek-speaking ambassadors, he employed an interpreter to translate the letters from the emperor; but this may have been due to the formalities of court protocol rather than of necessity (Malalas, ed. Migne 1860: 670).
It can hardly be doubted, from the evidence of survivors such as the `proto-Ge`ez’ inscriptions of Matara, Safra, and Anza, and the series of royal inscriptions, that there was a fair body of written material in Ge`ez extant in Aksumite times, though examples found to date cannot in any way compare numerically with the sort of material surviving from most other ancient civilizations. Small inscriptions have been found on vessels of stone and pottery (Littmann 1913: IV; Drewes and Schneider 1967: 96ff; Schneider 1965: 91-2; Anfray 1972: pl. III). One, on a rock on Beta Giyorgis hill overlooking Aksum, seems to be a boundary-marker reading `Boundary between (the land of) SMSMY and SBT’ — either the names of the owners or of the parcels of land. Future archaeological missions will almost undoubtedly reveal more of these minor inscriptions. Abroad, Ge`ez inscriptions are known from Meroë, Socotra (Bent 1898), and South Arabia. A later manifestation in the development of letters in Ethiopia was the translation of various literary works from other languages such as Greek, Arabic, and Syriac into Ge`ez, with concomitant effects on the language itself.

15/04/2022

The language of the Aksumite kingdom was Ge`ez (Ethiopic), a Semitic tongue assumed (but not proven) to have an ancestry in old South Arabian. Ge`ez, possibly deriving its name from the Agwezat or Agazi tribal group, is now a dead language except for its use in traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church rituals and in some specialized circumstances, such as poetry. It was written in characters descending from the same parentage as the script now called Epigraphic South Arabian, but more cursive in form; the modern Ethiopian alphabet is the only survivor of this script today. Its development required that certain letters employed in dialects of South Arabian were omitted and others added as necessary. A number of early texts and graffiti from Ethiopia are themselves in a cursive form of the old South Arabian script (Drewes 1962). Time and the influence of the Cush*tic languages of Ethiopia (Agaw or Central Cush*tic being the most important) both helped in the transference from the original language to Ge`ez.
The arguments advanced for the origins of the Ge`ez script would fill a small book (Ullendorff 1955; 1960: 112ff; Drewes 1962: Ch. V; Drewes and Schneider 1976). Some have seen it as a development from the monumental South Arabian script, others as related to the contemporary cursive scripts found in both Arabia and Ethiopia; the mechanics of the change, the experts have suggested, could have been through either intentional or accidental alteration. The script could have been inspired by an early importation, or even by a more recent inspiration subsequent to the period of the earlier inscriptions. A fair number of inscriptions have been found dating from pre-Aksumite times and written in the epigraphic South Arabian script, at such places as Yeha, Kaskase, and Hawelti-Melazo. Some of these employ a form of the language which is apparently more or less pure Sabaic, while others, though contemporary, show linguistic features perhaps indicating that they were carved by Ethiopians (Drewes 1962; Schneider 1976i).
The use of the South Arabian script continued on into Aksumite times (or was revived then?) and as late as the reigns of Kaleb and W`ZB monumental inscriptions were still written in a version of this script, but using the Ge`ez language. In the early fourth century, the purely consonantal script was found inadequate, and a system of vowels was adopted, which greatly facilitated the reading of Ge`ez. The origins and history of the vowels system are uncertain; it might have been influenced by some Indian scripts (Pankhurst 1974: 220-2; Chatterji 1967: 53), and it might, in turn, have influenced Armenian (Olderogge 1974: 195-203). This innovation was employed on the inscriptions, and doubtless, on whatever (not so far discovered) papyrus, parchment or another impermanent medium, the Aksumites kept their records. It was not generally adopted on the coins, whose legends remained unvowelled, except for very rare and partial vowels on the coins of one or two later kings, until the end of the series. However, even without the vowels, the coins provide a very interesting sequence from which the changes in the styles of the letter-forms can be ascertained from the third to the seventh century (Munro-Hay 1984iii).
This information, combined with inscriptional material, is one way of tentatively dating newly-discovered Ge`ez documents. However, such palaeographical work is still in its infancy and lacks sufficient numbers of documents which can be reliably dated to make it an efficient tool at present. Early inscriptions closely resembling South Arabian ones have been dated according to the palaeographical studies of Pirenne (1956), but again there might be a case for readjustment (Schneider 1976i). In a recent (unpublished) paper, Roger Schneider has commented on some fascinating anomalies in Ge`ez writing on Aksumite inscriptions and coins (see also Drewes 1955; Hahn 1987). The existence of one vocalized letter on certain silver coins of Wazeba, a predecessor of Ezana, may well indicate that the process of vocalization was under way before Ezana, though the unvocalized Ge`ez inscription of Ezana (DAE 7) has made it commonly accepted that the development of vocalization occurred during his reign. Littmann (1913, IV: 78), Drewes and Schneider all suggest deliberate archaizing; some of the letters, apart from lacking vowels, are of forms very much more ancient than those current for Ezana’s time.
This is not just over-elaborate academic discussion. For whatever reasons Ezana had this done (and Drewes suggests perhaps a desire to emphasize the links with South Arabia, or perhaps to point to the ancient origins of Aksumite royal power), it is of interest that almost no kings of Aksum in the subsequent centuries introduced vowelling on their coins, or when they did, it was only on a letter or two; and this long after vocalization must have been current on other media. Preceding the common use of Ge`ez, Greek was the chosen official language of the inscriptions and coins. This was evidently largely orientated towards foreign residents and visitors, and can hardly have been understood by more than the smallest section of the ruling class and merchant community. There must also have been a body of more or less learned men who acted as scribes in preparing the drafts of the inscriptions, perhaps priests or a special corps of clerks. Greek remained the language of the coins, particularly the gold, until the end of the coinage, but its quality degenerated quickly.

10/11/2021

10/11/2021

10/11/2021

10/11/2021

English
Early works in English in western Africa include a Liberian novel, Love in Ebony: A West African Romance, published in 1932 by Charles Cooper (pseudonym Varfelli Karlee), as well as such works of Ghanaian pulp literature as J. Benibengor Blay’s Emelia’s Promise and Fulfilment (1944). R.E. Obeng, a Ghanaian, wrote Eighteenpence (1941), an early work on the conflict between African and European cultures. Other early popular writers in Ghana include Asare Konadu, Efua Sutherland, and Kwesi Brew. The Nigerian Amos Tutuola wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town (1952), its construction revealing a clear linkage between the oral and literary traditions. In it the hero moves to Deads’ Town to bring his tapster back to the land of the living; the elixir that the hero brings back from the land of the dead, however, is an egg that is death-dealing as surely as it is life-giving. Tutuola is faithful to oral tradition, but he places the traditional journeying tale into a very contemporary framework.

Nigeria has been a font of creative writing in English, from the works of Chinua Achebe to those of Ben Okri. Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, is known for his drama, poetry, and prose. His The Interpreters (1965) weaves stories from the contemporary world to the mythic and historical past, manipulating time so that in the end the very structure of the story is a comment on the lives of the several protagonists. Soyinka was a contributor to and coeditor of the influential journal Black Orpheus, founded in 1957 and containing the early works of poets such as Christopher Okigbo of Nigeria, Dennis Brutus and Alex La Guma of South Africa, and Tchicaya U Tam’si of Congo (Brazzaville). Another literary journal, The Horn, launched in 1958 by John Pepper Clark, provided additional opportunities for writers to have their works published. Transition, a literary journal begun in Uganda in 1960 by Rajat Neogi, was also a valuable outlet for many African writers.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) is perhaps the best-known African novel of the 20th century. Its main character is Okonkwo, whose tragic and fatal flaw, his overweening ambition, wounds him. His frenzied desire to be anything but what his father was causes him to develop a warped view of his society, so that in the end that view becomes (thanks to seven humiliating years in exile) reality to him. When he returns, he cannot accept seeing his people in the throes of adapting to the intruding whites, and things fall apart for him: it is not the society he envisioned, and he takes his life. Things Fall Apart is a precolonial novel that ends with the coming of colonialism, which triggers Okonkwo’s demise. Okonkwo is in any case doomed because of his skewed vision. Flora Nwapa wrote the novel Efuru (1966), the story of a talented, brilliant, and beautiful woman who, living in a small community, is confined by tradition. A woman’s fundamental role, childbearing, is prescribed for her, and if she does not fulfill that role she suffers the negative criticism of members of her society. Borrowing a technique from the oral tradition, Nwapa injects the dimension of fantasy through the character of the goddess Uhamiri, who is a mythic counterpart to the real-life Efuru. In The Slave Girl (1977) the novelist Buchi Emecheta tells the story of Ojebeta, who, as she journeys from childhood to adulthood, moves not to freedom and independence but from one form of slavery to another. Okri blends fantasy and reality in his novel The Famished Road (1991; part of a trilogy that also includes Songs of Enchantment [1993] and Infinite Riches [1998]). In the novel, which addresses the reality of postcolonial Nigeria, Okri uses myth, the Yoruba abiku (“spirit child”), and other fantasy images to shift between preindependence and postindependence settings. The spiritual and real worlds are linked in the novel, the one a dimension of the other, in a narrative mode that African storytellers have been using for centuries.

In other parts of western Africa, Lenrie Peters of The Gambia and Syl Cheyney-Coker of Sierra Leone were among the most important 20th-century writers. The novelist Ebou Dibba and the poet Tijan M. Sallah were also from The Gambia. Cameroonian authors writing in English during the second half of the 20th century include Ba’bila Mutia, John S. Dinga, and Jedida Asheri. Writers in Ghana during the same period include Amma Darko, B. Kojo Laing, Kofi Awoonor, and Ayi Kwei Armah. In Fragments (1970) Armah tells of a youth, Baako, who returns from the United States to his Ghanaian family and is torn between the new demands of his home and the consequent subversion of a traditional past represented by the mythic Naana, his blind grandmother, who establishes a context for the tragic story Baako is experiencing.

The dominant writer to emerge from East Africa is the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In A Grain of Wheat (1967) he tells the story of Mugo, alone and alienated, farming after having played a role in the Mau Mau rebellion; though he has considered himself the Moses of his people, he has a terrible secret. As Mugo’s story unfolds, the novelist works into his narrative other stories, including those of Gikonyo, Mumbi, and Karanja, each of whom has an unsavoury past as well. Ngugi constructs the story around the proverb “Kikulacho ki nguoni mwako” (“That which bites you is in your own clothing”). Later in his career Ngugi, who spent many years in exile from Kenya, engaged many writers in a debate as to whether African writers should compose their works in European or African languages.

Other East African novelists include Okello Oculi, Grace Ogot, Peter K. Palangyo, and W.E. Mkufya. In Timothy Wangusa’s novel Upon This Mountain (1989), the character Mwambu climbs a mountain and comes of age. In two novels from Uganda a boy moves to manhood: Abyssinian Chronicles (2000), by Moses Isegawa, and The Season of Thomas Tebo (1986), by John Nagenda, the latter an allegorical novel in which a boy’s loss of innocence is tied to politics in that country. One of Africa’s greatest novelists is the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, who wrote a trilogy composed of the novels Maps (1986), Gifts (1992), and Secrets (1998). Maps is the story of a youth, Askar, growing up in a Somalia divided by Ethiopia. With the mythic Misra, who becomes his surrogate mother, and by means of a geographical movement that occurs within a rich mixture of politics and s*x, the boy seeks his identity, a quest that becomes linked to the identity of the land across which he moves.

From Malawi came such writers as Jack Mapanje, whose collection of poems Skipping Without Ropes (1998) reflects on his four years as a political prisoner, and David Rubadiri. Other writers from Southern Africa include Fwanyanga M. Mulikita and Dominic Mulaisho from Zambia and Berhane Mariam Sahle Sellassie, Daniachew Worku, and Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin from Ethiopia. Solomon M. Mutswairo, Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya, Chenjerai Hove, Yvonne Vera, Alexander Kanengoni, J. Nozipo Maraire, and Batisai Parwada are among Zimbabwe’s writers in English. Tsitsi Dangarembga wrote Nervous Conditions (1988), a story of two Shona girls, Tambudzai and Nyasha, both attempting to find their place in contemporary Zimbabwe. Nyasha has been abroad and wonders about the effect that Westernization has had on her and her family, while Tambudzai is longing to break out of her traditional world. Looming in the background are mythic figures, including Lucia, Tambudzai’s aunt.

Doris Lessing is a British writer who spent her early years in what is today Zimbabwe. Her novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) centres on Dick Turner and Mary Turner, a white couple attempting to become a part of the rural African landscape. Lessing depicts a stereotyped African character, Moses, a black servant, whose name gives him historical and religious resonance. He becomes dominant over the European Mary, manipulating her fears and love of him until in the end he destroys her. Lessing finds mythic fantasy dimensions in the Europeans, much as Mustafa Sa’eed does in the women of England in al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1966).

There is much writing in English by expatriates that is rooted in South Africa, from the poetry of Thomas Pringle to E.A. Kendall’s The English Boy at the Cape (1835), the novels of H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan, and Turning Wheels (1937), by Stuart Cloete. Olive Schreiner was the first major South African-born writer. Her novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) continues to have an international resonance. Pauline Smith wrote powerful short stories; her novel The Beadle (1926) deals largely with the experiences of Afrikaners in the Eastern Cape region. Sarah Gertrude Millin had an international audience with such works as God’s Stepchildren (1924). The short-lived literary review Voorslag (“Whiplash”), begun in 1926, published for wider audiences work by such poets as Roy Campbell, William Plomer, and Laurens van der Post.

A common subject in the works of the many South African authors writing in English during the 20th century is the racial segregation, codified as apartheid in 1948, that dominated the country until the early 1990s. In two early novels, Mine Boy (1946), by Peter Abrahams, and Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), by Alan Paton, black Africans go to Johannesburg and experience the terror of apartheid. In To Every Birth Its Blood (1981), Mongane Wally Serote tells the stories of Tsi Molope and Oupa Molope. Tsi looks to his past and wonders, “Where does a river begin to take its journey to the sea?” The world in which Oupa—the son of Mary, Tsi’s sister—lives postdates the Soweto uprising of 1976, a time when resistance to apartheid took hold of a new generation and South Africa witnessed attacks and bombings. Because of their experiences with the police, the Molope family becomes more politicized. Serote wants the reader to see the human side of his characters—their vulnerabilities, their uncertainties—while he also wants to demonstrate that it is not an easy matter to make the revolutionary leap. A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981), by Sydney Sipho Sepamla, which is set in Soweto, exposes the fearful effects of apartheid.

The playwright Athol Fugard in 1982 produced his play “Master Harold”…and the Boys, the story of a white boy, Hally, in a restaurant in which two black African men, Willie Malopo and Sam Semela, are waiters. It is a story of a boy’s coming of age within the realities of the racist system of South Africa. As the story develops, Hally transfers his fear, love, and hate of his father to Sam, and in the end he treats Sam as he cannot treat his father. The result is to open anew the wounds of apartheid. The novel July’s People (1981), by Nadine Gordimer, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, takes place in an imagined postindependence South Africa. The story deals with the Smales, a white couple, and their relationship with July, their black servant. By means of flashbacks the Smales reconstruct their past, the world of a Johannesburg suburb during the apartheid period. There is a war, and Maureen Smale and Bamford Smale escape from their suburban home and go north, where these erstwhile liberals come to July’s rural home and learn, by their interactions with July and his family and friends, that they cannot move past their former relationship with their servant and cannot see him from any perspective but that of liberal, self-confident white overlords. That hopelessly compromised position is the impasse that Gordimer investigates in this novel. D.M. Zwelonke is the pseudonymous author of Robben Island (1973), a novel dealing with the political prison maintained by the South African government off the shores of Cape Town from the mid-1960s. It is the story of Bekimpi, an African political leader jailed at Robben Island, and it relates his dreams and fantasies, his despair and anger, and his torture and death.

10/11/2021

Literatures in European and European-derived languages
Afrikaans
Afrikaans literature in South Africa can be viewed in the context of Dutch literary tradition or South African literary tradition. Within an African context, Afrikaans literature will be forever on the outside. As is the case with the language, it is caught in an identity crisis that was created irrevocably by the fiercely defended political and cultural identity of the Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in 1652 and whose descendants, together with English-speaking whites, took over the government in 1948, after which the notorious system of apartheid was enshrined in laws that would be demolished only in the early 1990s. The conservative branch of the Afrikaner people, always the most numerous and the most powerful, was in conflict throughout the 20th century with a talented and growing group of young poets and novelists, such as C. Louis Leipoldt and Breyten Breytenbach, who sought to broaden the confines of an increasingly limited people and literature. The history of Afrikaans literature is the history of the Afrikaners, an alien people whose literature is a testimony to that state of alienation.

Afrikaans, with its roots in Dutch, has been spoken in South Africa mainly by whites since the 18th century. The First Afrikaans Language Movement began in 1875, led by Stephanus Jacobus du Toit and others; it represented an effort to make Afrikaans a language separate from Dutch. The first newspaper in Afrikaans, Die Patriot (“The Patriot”), began publication in 1876. The linguistic shift from Dutch to Afrikaans did not occur without considerable dispute among the whites of Dutch descent. It was after the South African War (1899–1902)—which became a prominent subject of early Afrikaans literature—that Afrikaans became a significant written language. “Winternag” (1905; “Winter’s Night”), a poem by Eugène Marais, and “Die vlakte” (1906; “The Plain”), a poem by Jan Celliers, dramatically ushered in this new literary language, along with language organizations such as the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie (founded 1909). Die brandwag (“The Outpost”), a magazine, had a literary section from 1910. The Hertzog Prize for poetry, prose, and drama in Afrikaans was established in 1914. Publishing houses specializing in Afrikaans publications began in 1914 and 1915. In 1914 Cornelius Jakob Langenhoven fostered Afrikaans in schools, and the language was soon after studied at universities and used as a medium of instruction. Parliament recognized Afrikaans as an official language in 1925, six years after it was named the language of the Dutch Reformed Church. Earlier 19th-century writing had been heavily didactic; by the 1920s this had begun to change.

Poets became the most potent harbingers of the new language as the Second Afrikaans Language Movement began; they included Leipoldt, Marais, Celliers, Jakob Daniel du Toit (Totius), Daniel François Malherbe, and Toon van den Heever. Leipoldt, who would one day be condemned as a traitor to Afrikaners, was probably one of the greatest and most original poets of the early 20th century, while Marais in his poetry linked European tradition to the realities of life in South Africa. Prose also appeared during this period, moving away from such melodramatic works as Johannes van Wyk (1906), a novel by J.H.H. de Waal, to more rigorously realistic historical works, such as those by Gustav Preller. Realism began to dominate Afrikaans prose, especially in the work of Jochem van Bruggen, who wrote a trilogy, the first part of which was Ampie, die natuurkind (1931; “Ampie, the Child of Nature”), a study of a poor white in South Africa. A.A. Pienaar (pseudonym Sangiro) wrote popular books about animals. Drama also began to flourish through the writings of Leipoldt, Langenhoven, and H.A. Fagan. Langenhoven was also a popular poet, as was A.G. Visser.

Dramatic events in the 1930s—including a drought that caused many farmers to move to the cities, significant political changes, a sharpening of racial conflict, and the deepening of the Afrikaans-English conflict—isolated Afrikaners more dramatically in South Africa, and fiercely partisan organizations such as the Afrikaner-Broederbond and Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge gained new adherents. The Afrikaner poets known as the Dertigers (“Thirtyers,” or writers of the 1930s) infuriated conservative Afrikaners with a new type of poetry. The poetry of W.E.G. Louw, N.P. van Wyk Louw, and Elisabeth Eybers was at the heart of this fertile activity, which centred on experimentation with form. Van Wyk Louw’s Raka (1941) is a rhymed study of evil, with Raka as the incarnation of this evil taking over a community. Uys Krige wrote romantic poetry but is known for his war poetry and as a dramatist. There was prose written during this period by Abraham H. Jonker, C.M. van den Heever, and Johannes van Melle, whose Bart Nel (1936), dealing with the Afrikaner rebellion of 1914–15, is considered by some to be the finest novel in Afrikaans.

After World War II, literary magazines carried Afrikaans works. D.J. Opperman continued the experimentation with the Afrikaans language in his poetry, and he introduced decisively South African racial themes into his work. In 1954 Arthur Fula became one of the first black Africans to write a novel in Afrikaans. Audrey Blignault and Elise Muller wrote short stories and essays. Anna M. Louw wrote novels.

The Sestigers (“Sixtyers,” or writers of the 1960s) attempted to do for prose what the Dertigers had done for poetry. Jan Rabie, Etienne Leroux, Dolf van Niekerk, André P. Brink, Abraham de Vries, and Chris Barnard experimented with the novel and moved into areas largely forbidden until that time, such as s*x and atheism. Brink’s Lobola vir die lewe (1962; “Pledge for Life”) and Orgie (1965; “Orgy”) caused sensations. Bartho Smit wrote Moeder Hanna (1959; “Mother Hanna”), an acclaimed drama about the South African War. He also wrote Putsonderwater (1962; “Well-Without-Water”), considered among the finest plays produced in Afrikaans; it could not be performed because of its political message. Elsa Joubert wrote a novel about a black woman, Die swerfjare van Poppie Nongena (1978; The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena, or Poppie). Karel Schoeman’s ’n Ander land (1984; “Another Country”) moved into the sensitive political and social realities of South Africa. Adam Small wrote works, such as Kanna hy kô hystoe (1965; Kanna—He Is Coming Home), that revealed the realities of the lives of nonwhites in South Africa. Ingrid Jonker wrote intensely personal poetry. Breytenbach wrote surreal poetry, his work revealing his struggle with the Afrikaners’ political situation in South Africa. His Katastrofes (1964; Catastrophes) is a series of sketches that take racism, death, and madness as their subjects.

These themes persisted through the end of the 20th century. Riana Scheepers, in Die ding in die vuur (1990; “The Thing in the Fire”), a collection of short stories, blended Zulu oral tradition with the world of apartheid. Marlene van Niekerk wrote Triomf (1994; “Triumph”; Eng. trans. Triomf), a novel based on Sophiatown, a black settlement near Johannesburg that was replaced by the South African government in the 1950s and ’60s by a white working-class suburb dubbed Triomf. In Lettie Viljoen’s Klaaglied vir Koos (1984; “Lament for Koos”), a husband leaves his family to join the fight against apartheid. In his novels Toorberg (1986; Ancestral Voices) and Kikoejoe (1996; Kikuyu), Etienne van Heerden dealt with 20th-century South African history. (See also treatment of literature in Afrikaans in South African literature.)