INTRODUCTION

South African literature effectively began in the late 19th

century in the states preceding the Republic of South Africa and became fairly copious in the 20th. Most colonial endeavours have an essentially capitalist foundation. The stronger power that colonises the powerless country seeks to expand its borders for various reasons like civilizing the native inhabitants, converting them to Christianity and using the resources found in the new territory. The long years of their abject misery led to the revolt of the colonized, which culminated in their independence.

Post Colonialism stems from the material and historical experience of colonialism and is political as well as interdisciplinary both in approach and nature. The term “post colonial literature” has a wide connotation and has been shaped by the study of books written on post colonialism. Most post colonial critics have found three common characteristics of post colonial literature.

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1) Social and cultural change or erosion.2) Misuse of power and exploitation; even

though the large power ceases to control them as a colony, the settlers still seem to possess power over the natives.

3) Colonial abandonment and alienation.

After enduring restraints in all walks of life by the imperial power for a long time, the newly independent African countries were faced with the task of expressing were faced with the task of expressing themselves in modes suited to their native tradition. But colonization exposed them to a totally new culture and literature produced by the new generation writers which has nothing much to do with the old culture. Post colonial writing tends to speak for a new hybrid culture partaking of the elements of the settlers and the natives.

In a broader sense ‘post-colonial literature’ or ‘New English Literature’ is literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated by colonial empires. Post colonial literature is associated with a wide

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range of terms-‘writing back, re-writing and re-reading’ which describe the interpretation of literature under the perspective of the formerly colonized. The ‘anti-conquest narrative’ recasts indigenous inhabitants of colonized countries as victims rather than foes of the colonizers. This type of narrative depicts the colonized people in a more human light but risks absolving the colonizer of the responsibility for addressing the impacts of colonization by assuming that native inhabitants were doomed to their fate.

The explosive growth of interest in African literature in the past two decades has ensured that the voice of African writers will reverberate for a long time. The colour and the climate of Africa pose a threat to writers who find the traditional mode of emulation of human values inadequate and irrelevant. Realistic fiction and the chronological narrative have been discarded, having been found insufficient to project the vastness and complexities of life and experience and issues such as imperialism, colonialism, racism, slavery and class exploitation. Writers use literary devices like allegory,

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symbols, fantasy, magic realism, fluctuating narrative designs, striking fusion of oral, narrative, history and fiction in order to depict effectively the prevalent psychic pain in the post-war and post-colonial situation. Over the last hundred years, African writers have written in diverse forms, styles and in many languages. They have been widely published both on the African continent, and in Europe, America and Asia.

The oral tradition of East Africa has deeply affected many modern writers and it has grown in importance as part of the curriculum in schools and universities. Oral literature may be either in prose or verse. The prose is often mythological or historical and includes takes of the trickster character. Story tellers in Africa sometimes use the call-and-response technique to narrate their stories. Poetry, often sung includes narrative epic, occupational verse, poems eulogizing the rulers and other prominent people.

Most African nations gained their independence in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the liberation, African literature has grown dramatically in quantity and in recognition with numerous African works appearing in

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Western Academic Curricula and on ‘best of’ lists compiled at the end of the 20th

century. African writers in this period wrote both in western languages and in the vernacular languages. The African writers used as their themes conflicts like the clash between Africa’s past and present, between tradition and modernity, between the indigenous and the foreign, between individualism and community, between socialism and capitalism and between inhumanity and humanity.

The colonial education systems in Africa emphasized on European ideology, tradition and history which obstructed and undermined the transmission of African cultures as students were forced to adopt a European perspective of the world and their roles. In the post independence era writers began to propose new ideals in education to bring about a change in the prevalent system. The anti-imperialist writings of Ngugi Wa Thiongo helped to force ground the dilemmas faced by post colonial countries. Ngugi insisted that Africans should use their own literature both to understand the culture and to strengthen

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their continuity with their past. Writers like Nehanda and Bones (Zimbabwe), Chinua Achebe and Soyinka (Nigeria), also express the post colonial situation with the intensity and accuracy.

The social relevance of the African today has been the major theme of South African literature. Men and women of all races have enriched South Africa with a varied literary output in several languages. The unique feature of South African literature lies in its relation to South African history including the history of Apartheid and in the challenges posted to the writers by the post-apartheid period.

‘John Maxwell Coetzee’ is one among the youthful literary voices who spoke against the tyrannies of the apartheid regime during the 1970s and 1980s. Born in Cape Town on February 9th 1940, he was the son of Zacharias and Vera Wehemeyer Coetzee. His father was the son of a farmer and he practiced as an attorney in small towns in the Western Cape. The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was a young boy. After his schooling at St.Joseph’s College, Rondebosch, Cape

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Town where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in English in 1960 and honours in mathematics and in 1961. From 1962-1965 he worked as a mathematician and computer programmer in England. His life at this time is recounted in his autobiographical novel ‘youth’. Coetzee married Philipa Jabber in 1963 and divorced her in 1980. In 1963 he was awarded a Master of Arts from the University of Cape Town. In 1984 he became a professor of general literature, a post which he still holds.

Coetzee began his career as a novelist by portraying the brutalities and the inhuman torture inflicted on the blacks in South Africa by the white regime. His distinct prose was identified early as one of the most radical and eloquent of this period. In spite of the mounting critical acclaim, Coetzee remains one of the most elusive writers of recent times whose work seems to be constructed in such a way that it is difficult to discover on single frame work of interpretation. It is also difficult to define the specific place. Coetzee occupies as a writer. He has often transgressed the boundaries between what is and what is not South

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African. Though Coetzee created Universal and often allegorical fiction, he has written some novels which reflect the different phases of South African politics belonging to the genre of social realism. The subtle narrative strategies that he employs question the very discourses of power that endorse atrocious and unjust social systems and make him a more politically insightful writer than most self-proclaimed political writers.

There is no denying the fact that a strong indictment of racism forms one of the pivotal themes of his early novels, though he cannot be labeled as a writer committed to social and political causes. He is basically a writer who tries to grapple with the nature of man-his evil deeds, his capacity to torture and its resultant suffering. The international reputation that Coetzee now enjoys is fairly indicated by the numerous prestigious awards that his books have won over the years. He has been awarded Britain’s Booker-McConnell Prize, the Jerusalem prize in Israel, and South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency(CAN) literary award to name a few. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize for

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literature. In its citation the Swedish Academy commented that his novels are conspicuous for their ‘well crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance’. He was the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice for Life and Times of Michael K, in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999.

Coetzee’s literary career began in 1974 with the publication of ‘Dusklands’ which draws a parallel between Americans in Vietnam and the early Dutch settlers in South Africa. His ‘Wailing for the Barbarians’(1980) deals with the story of the Magistrate an analogue of all men living in complicity with the regimes that ignore justice and decency. “life and Times of Michael K” is a moving account of a son and mother and their hazardous journey in South Africa torn apart by civil war.

In ‘The Master of Petersburg’, Coetzee renders his gratitude to other literary pieces not ably the works of Dostoevsky, especially ‘Crime and Punishment’. It is loosely based on the life of this great master of the Russian literature whose private, political and creative selves

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are teased out and brought into conflict. The novel is also a study of the interrelationship between reading and writing.

Foe (1986), one of Coetzee’s more mature works is a rewriting of Defoe’s classic eighteenth century novel ‘Robinson Crusoe’ with two major alterations namely the inclusion of the female castaway, Susan Barton and a Friday with his tongue cut off. This book may be described as metafiction, focusing on the relationship among the author, foe, the struggling authoress, Susan Barton and the mute Friday. By re-imagining a canonical novel of British imperialism. It adopts and adapts a distinct strategy within post colonial fiction as it ‘writes back’ to the culture of the colonizer.

Apart from these Coetzee has also authored “In the Heart of the Country’ (1999), The lives of Animals (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), his latest book, Slow Man (2005), Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997), Youth (2001), and a number of critical essays. Several of his critical essays and lectures are collected in Stranger Shores: Essays 1989-1999 (2001) and White Writing (1988). Doubling the

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Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) contains a selection of his essays and some substantial written interviews undertaken by the South African critic David Atwell.

Age of Iron (1990), an epistolary novel; consist of letters written by Elizabeth Curren to her daughter, a voluntary exile in the US. It bends private suffering and political turmoil into the fierce situation of the apartheid. The powerful while torturing the blacks is the recurrent theme of the novel. The novel delineates the harsh realities and the binary conflicts between the blacks and the whites. In the apartheid era, it is the whites who act as agents of torture while the black majority represents the oppressed group. The novel skillfully juxtaposes the power politics between the colonizer and the colonized in the apartheid regime.

We should probably mention that J.M.Coetzee himself was a well known critic of apartheid, and he ultimately left South Africa for Australia in 2002 and became an Australian Citizen in 2006.neverthless, most people seem to know Coetzee as a writer whose works focus mainly on the problems

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facing South Africans and that illuminate his some what ambivalent attitude towards the country in which he was raised while the historical period we encounter Age of Iron has now passed the memories of Apartheid live on in his works.

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