Teaching "Apartheid" Literature in South Africa

Workshop Presentation
Brenda Flanagan  

South African literature, written about and during the country’s period of Apartheid, is still not widely taught in Western Cape universities, especially in those universities where Afrikaans is the language of instruction. Because tropes critical of the laws that forcibly segregated the population are embedded in stories by writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Mariam Tlali, their works are barely taught. Many of the professors at universities in the Cape grew up under Apartheid when such texts were banned, so even though Apartheid officially ended nearly 30 years ago, this rich body of literature is still underrepresented in academic curricula. This paper is a guide to the teaching of “difficult” texts via literary analyses conducted in South Africa in 2023 under the auspices of the Fulbright Specialist Program.