It is paradoxical that while a systematic study of African popular arts and popular culture has concerned African scholars further afield in Africa for more than three decades, in South Africa such study remains confined to popular arts such as ethno-music, popular music and popular theatre to the total exclusion of indigenous language writing. Numerous descriptive analyses exist that map the contours of South African popular arts and cultural sites, but only a few have paid any attention to both print and broadcast media in indigenous languages as texts that foreground popular imperatives. It seems the Africanlanguage literary tradition is confined by approaches derived from earlier paradigms applied in the study of its literatures. These preferred theoretical models (including Structuralism and New Criticism) have consciously precluded certain cultural forms as ‘low-brow’ and negated their significance as constituting statements of ‘proper sensibilities.’ Consequently, the African-language literary tradition has a narrow view of what constitutes indigenous literary writing, focusing on formal oral and written literatures and excluding radio drama, emerging popular narratives, theatre, television and film. With waning interest in formally written literatures in indigenous languages and the rise in the quantity and significance of other forms of artistic production, this tradition in South Africa has experienced a paralysis.

A fresh approach to African-language literatures is needed and this is what I hope to introduce in this book.

Works in the African-language literary tradition, with its neatly categorised genres, have been, and still largely continue to be, perceived either as imitations or carbon copies of Western literary models of bourgeois origin or as offshoots of traditional literature. Yet these literatures which have emerged under conditions only remotely similar to those of the Western bourgeoisie and completely different from those which gave birth to traditional literature, shuttled to and fro between the past and the contemporary to articulate certain imperatives. These imperatives, recreated through powerful narratives, poetics and discursive idioms capturing African life experiences, were neither fully traditional nor modern but highlighted the dynamic, multiple, cultural matrix which was forever growing and unfolding into the recesses, crevices, holes, twists and bends of modern life.