GOODENOUGH MASHEGO | How Literary awards influence cultural policy and national identity

South Africa’s first National Poet Laureate, the late Prof Mazisi Kunene, probably ranks as the most prolific wordsmith in an indigenous language, isiZulu, straddling both the 20th and 21st centuries.

Exiled from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, he wrote in and taught isiZulu at universities across the world. By the time he returned home, he had over 10,000 manuscripts - mostly poetry, all in isiZulu - shipped to his eThekwini abode. His family has since converted it into the Mazisi Kunene Literary Museum, which displays the prodigious treasure trove he left for our country’s cultural heritage.

As we head into Heritage Month in September 2025, the South African Literary Awards (SALA) take pride in celebrating 20 years of existence as the premier awards scheme recognising literary productions in all of our country’s official languages across almost all literary categories. SALA was the first to launch the South African National Poet Laureate Prize, with Prof Mazisi Kunene as the inaugural recipient, “…for producing African literature in African languages…”

In Nigerian author Okey Ndibe’ first novel Arrows of Rain, a grandmother says to her journalist grandson: “A story that must be told never forgives silence.” In a way, Ndibe’s character was throwing down to humans a gauntlet once thrown to lions: that they will continue to be vanquished as long as they allow humans to narrate the story of the hunt.

The statement also challenges another racist, yet increasingly common saying: “The place to hide something from a Black person is to write it in a book.” More salt on the wound would be: “Especially in their own language.”

Since its inception, the South African Literary Awards (SALA) has struggled to attract entries in South Africa’s nine indigenous African languages.

For a country of 65 million people, of which approximately 6% are white, it is a painful indictment that so few books - beyond the school market - are written in indigenous African languages for adult readers. Some have posited, quite mistakenly, that the architects of Bantu Education, unlike other colonialists, were progressive because they supported indigenous African language publishing, investing resources in their development through vast quantities of books in Sesotho sa Leboa (Lebowa), Xitsonga (Gazankulu), SiSwati (KaNgwane), isiNdebele (KwaNdebele), isiZulu (KwaZulu), Sesotho (Qwaqwa), Tshivenda (Venda), Setswana (Bophuthatswana) and isiXhosa (Ciskei and Transkei).

What is ignored in that publishing enterprise is the real intention of the project: to limit Africans’ access to literature in their mother tongue strictly to schools and nothing beyond. It also perpetuated the lie that there are only nine ethnic communities in South Africa - condemning many linguistic communities to extinction, assimilation, and erasure. It was classical ethnic cleansing.

The policy created an adult who stopped reading after school. For them, reading became an exercise in passing Standard 6, Junior Certificate or Matric - not in the accumulation of knowledge. This explains why, even today, few books are written in indigenous African languages for the adult market. Fringe authors such as Sabata-mpho Mokae, Moses Seletisha, Kabelo Kgatea and a handful of others have recently pioneered a renaissance.

South African writers, to a large extent, don’t write biographies, novels, creative non-fiction, poetry or other genres in indigenous African languages.

This presents a challenge to institutions such as SALA, which exist to award excellent writing, as every year they are inundated with entries in English and Afrikaans, and only a token few in indigenous African languages. Sesotho language expert Winston Mohapi argues that the dearth of indigenous language literature leads directly to a lack of African scholarship: “At conferences, speakers quote European authors and recycle South African English authors from north of the Limpopo, but not African authors.”

Thus, Ndibe’s year 2000 statement remains potent even today, when many stories are told by African writers about African lives.

Between 2000 and 2010 there was a deliberate drive by legacy publishers to produce as many books by young African writers as possible. They favoured gritty storylines, highly experimental storytelling and young African writers who were mostly writing in English.

Publishersdidn’t mind that an author’s narrative was sometimes wanting, as long as there was a manuscript. They would hire experienced editors to chisel blunt writing into sharp, publishable novels.

This created a boom of novels and writers who went on to achieve national and international prominence. This was the founding era of novelists such as Zukiswa Wanner, Sfiso Mzobe, Cynthia Jele, Kgebetli Moele, Kopano Matlwa, Niq Mhlongo, Nthikeng Mohlele and Thando Mnqolozwana.

It was also the age of Timbila Poetry, Deep South, Kotaz, Botsotso, Dye Hard and many others: small independent publishers with a strong focus on poetry.

Botsotso and Timbila were activist publishers with a bias towards indigenous African language publishing.

Much rural and township poetry was published.

Scamtho poet Ike Mboneni wa Muila’s Gova was published by Botsotso. Dlayani Shishenge’s Nsati wa Gayisa and Phomelelo Machika’s Peu Tša Tokologo came from Timbila.

There were anthologies that contained poems in almost all official South African languages.

Timbila’ founder, Vonani Bila, is a lifelong student of luminaries such as South Sudanese intellectual Taban Lo Liyong and the late Kenyan sage Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who, as young pan-African activists at the University of Nairobi’s Department of Literature, collaborated (with Henry Owuor-Anyumba) on a 1968 memo titled On the Abolition of the English Department.

Discussing the memo, Ngugi told Al Jazeera’s Larry Madowo in 2015: “…if you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture and then you add all the other languages to it, that is empowerment.”

Writing in languages other than English (and other colonial tongues) provides African societies with a mirror o see themselves in all their nuances. My criticism of Nigerian literature, which I love, has been its failure to present the country in its full vista. It seems obsessed with perpetuating a colonial literary status quo.

Apart from Chioma Okereke’s 2024 novel Water Baby, few writers take readers into the slums of floating Makoko in Lagos. Little is told about the hundreds of ethnic communities living side by side in that vast, diverse country. Instead, stories are excessively infested with kola nuts, palm oils, fufu, jollof rice and fish soup.

South African authors seem to have successfully navigated this minefield. If one reads ten South African novels, one can tell - through character names, cuisine, and ways of living - whether a story is set among the amaXhosa, amaZulu, Basotho, Batswana or another community. Names alone reveal a story’ setting faster than a politician selling a lie.

While literary strides have been made, there has also been a slump in arts and culture funding from the National Treasury.

At the dawn of democracy, funders from Scandinavian, Nordic and other countries, who supported South African arts during apartheid, shifted their focus to other priorities.

It was left to the South African government to pick up the tab and guarantee that literatureproduced reflected the rainbow nature of the country. If a country is 94% Black, literature funding must reflect that; and such funding should aim to create a readership that, in turn, invests in book publishing and consumption.

South Africa can take a leaf from Mexico’s oldest non-profit, state-funded publishing initiative, Fondo de Cultura Económica (Fund for Economic Culture), founded in 1934. In May 2025 it announced an ambition to create 2.5 million new readers across Latin America. Its director, Paco Ignacio Taibo, said during a press briefing: “…the book is the great vehicle, the transporter of information. From 2019 to the present, 21 million books have been produced and 24 million sold.”

Indigenous language publishing in Mexico is funded through state and private sector collaboration, resulting in the FCE producing, in six years, 98 low-cost titles totalling 3.1 million copies, priced between 46 US cents and $1 (about R18). The publisher has produced 65 Nobel laureates. Note that Mexico has 68 spoken languages and, unlike South Africa, no official national language - all are equal.

A similar initiative in South Africa, properly resourced by the National Treasury with ring-fenced funds for indigenous language publishing, consumption and use (beyond official languages), could go a long way towards cultivating new writers and readers. It could be a hybrid of the Centre for the Book and a revived South African Book Council. As Mohapi says: “Literature goes with history. As long as we are not conversant with South African indigenous history, literature will suffer.”

Finally, there is an anecdote: some societies tell their daughters that when they grow up, if a young suitor takes them home, they should decide whether to grant him a second date based on the size of his bookshelf. One can only hope for a time when such a measure exists in South Africa on the condition that those bookshelves hold a significant number of indigenous African language books.