Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sharing Our Stories: South African Children's Literature in English
- 2 Reading Outside the Lines: Peritext and Authenticity in South African English Children's Books
- 3 San Tales – Again
- 4 Lessons From the Honey-Guide
- 5 Charles Rawden Maclean, Baden-Powell, and Dinuzulu's Beads
- 6 Two English Children's Authors in South Africa: J.R.R. Tolkien and Rudyard Kipling
- 7 The Chronicles of Peach Grove Farm: an Early South African Children's Book by Nellie Fincher
- 8 Is Pauline Smith's Platkops Children a Children's Book?
- 9 The Fall From Grace of Kingsley Fairbridge
- 10 Cigarette Card Albums and Patriotism
- 11 Cecil Shirley, Author and Illustrator of Little Veld Folk
- 12 “Some Far Siding”: South African English Children's Verse in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 Cross-Cultural Misreadings: Maccann and Maddy's Apartheid and Racism Revisited
- 14 Memories of Social Transition in Southern Africa: Unity Dow and Kagiso Lesego Molope
- 15 Visual Design in Collections of Writing in English by South African Children
- 16 Refugee Stories: the Suitcase Stories and I am an African
- 17 Sources for Research in South African Children's Literature in English
- 18 A Survey of Research in South African Children's Literature
- References
- Glossary
15 - Visual Design in Collections of Writing in English by South African Children
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sharing Our Stories: South African Children's Literature in English
- 2 Reading Outside the Lines: Peritext and Authenticity in South African English Children's Books
- 3 San Tales – Again
- 4 Lessons From the Honey-Guide
- 5 Charles Rawden Maclean, Baden-Powell, and Dinuzulu's Beads
- 6 Two English Children's Authors in South Africa: J.R.R. Tolkien and Rudyard Kipling
- 7 The Chronicles of Peach Grove Farm: an Early South African Children's Book by Nellie Fincher
- 8 Is Pauline Smith's Platkops Children a Children's Book?
- 9 The Fall From Grace of Kingsley Fairbridge
- 10 Cigarette Card Albums and Patriotism
- 11 Cecil Shirley, Author and Illustrator of Little Veld Folk
- 12 “Some Far Siding”: South African English Children's Verse in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 Cross-Cultural Misreadings: Maccann and Maddy's Apartheid and Racism Revisited
- 14 Memories of Social Transition in Southern Africa: Unity Dow and Kagiso Lesego Molope
- 15 Visual Design in Collections of Writing in English by South African Children
- 16 Refugee Stories: the Suitcase Stories and I am an African
- 17 Sources for Research in South African Children's Literature in English
- 18 A Survey of Research in South African Children's Literature
- References
- Glossary
Summary
Collections of writing by children are strange publications. The young people who wrote the contents have little part in the selection, editing, and appearance of the final publication, and the audience for whom they wrote or drew is often not the same as the final readership of the collection. In fact, the intended final readership is often by no means clear. The whole enterprise is organised by adults, who put together a package which represents childhood in a particular way, to suit their particular purpose.
Collections of writing by children and teenagers in English have been published in South Africa since at least 1919, when Collegiate Girls’ High School in Port Elizabeth produced The Blue and White Story Book. Another early collection, Our Young Writers, was compiled in 1943 from the juvenile pages of three newspapers by two 16-year-old boys, F. de Freitas and L. Hodes, and published by an established Cape Town publisher, Unie-Volkspers. The dedication reads, “The Youth of South Africa dedicates this book to their gallant elders on active service.” It was sold in aid of war funds, and featured, among others, patriotic pieces about the Second World War, in which South African forces were fighting with the Allies at the time. This foreshadowed several recent collections in having a declared theme, and its agenda of national unity and patriotism resonates in the post-apartheid Letters to Madiba (C. Smuts 2002), which I discuss later.
The publications originate in various ways. Magazines have been published which were dedicated exclusively or in part to children's writing; state and semi-state organisations, institutions such as schools and libraries, non-governmental organisations and commercial publishers have published once-off collections; and the South African Council for English Education has been publishing an annual, English Alive, since 1967. Publications of this sort are ephemeral, but I have assembled thirteen published between 1986 and 2003. I have not included a collection of young writing in Xhosa and Zulu called Imibono Yethu (Finlayson 2003), which is billed on an advertising poster as “for all you young people out there”, since I limit the discussion to texts primarily in English.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- SeedlingsEnglish Children’sReading and Writers in South Africa, pp. 156 - 168Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012