| National Character in South African English Children’s Literature New York: Routledge, 2006. Review by Karen Sands-O’Connor, Buffalo State College. In his introduction to National Character in South African English Children’ Literature, Elwyn Jenkins writes of a “hankering after authenticity” (xiv) apparent in South African writers throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In several senses, this need for authenticity drives Jenkins’s work. The fiction he discusses as well as the larger critical community is subject to various tests of authenticity, and he defends his own right to speak for and about children’s literature of South Africa. This insistence on a kind of genuineness reveals one of the fault-lines in contemporary children’s literature theory: whose voice—critical or literary—should be heard? The first evidence of where Jenkins stands on this question of what counts as South African children’s literature is in the title itself. Jenkins determines only to address English-language children’s literature, despite the fact that English is the most recent of all the languages considered South African. He admits that translation “from English into Afrikaans and vice versa has long been a lifesaver for children’s books in this country . . . adding to their economic viability” (xii). Since he later writes that by the mid-twentieth century, there were “more than 70 Afrikaans series, some of them containing scores of titles” (12) for children, presumably the translation of books was primarily a lifesaver for English-language authors and readers. But determining what makes something both South African and English proves to be a tricky process for Jenkins. Stories about country children by English-speaking writers dominate, and yet this domination “does not parallel the demographic reality” (7) of a primarily urban English-speaking population (the Afrikaans population was considerably more rural). Writers such as Jack Bennett and Stuart Cloete, “naturalized Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck in South Africa” (33). Other authors produced work that “ran in parallel with stories . . . produced both in Canada and Australia” (62). Throughout the book, Jenkins thus highlights the difficulty of determining national character in a land where “national borders were arbitrarily created” (xi) and where “globalization is making the concept of the nation state increasingly problematic” (xi). He seems to pass the influence of other places and people on South African English children’s literature off as mere cultural exchange, yet he also raises the question which belies this simplistic interpretation: “Can culture be changed while one’s essential character remains the same?” (151). Jenkins asks this question with regard to white authors writing about non-white people and their cultures, and he is careful to address the concerns of critics worldwide about cultural appropriation. Giving a nod to Edward Said and Michel Foucault, Jenkins comments that thanks to their work, “the imperialist discourse of the early twentieth century can now be understood to have created knowledge that gave the West the power to define the Other . . . as potentially inferior” (95). He cites several examples of folktale collections that might have this effect, although Jenkins puts the potential racism down to “benign paternalism” (96) rather than deliberate attempts to discredit or diminish the various African tribes and their cultures. However, Jenkins sees the problem—whether it be misguided paternalism or outright racism—as a concern of the past, rather than the present. In fact, according to Jenkins, since the end of the apartheid, “Finding something common in the South African past that would unite the nation became an imperative” (101), and most authors who use materials and create characters from cultures other than their own are involved in an “emphatically multicultural” (106) effort that represents “a transformed South Africa” (106). This optimistic view, of course, runs directly counter to that of other critics, such as Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann, who write in Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature 1985-1995 (Routledge, 2001), that, “To expect a perfect transition between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ regimes would scarcely be realistic. But there are novels dating from the mid-1990s that call into question even the wisdom and legitimacy of an ex-Apartheid nation” (MacCann and Maddy 57). For Jenkins, English-speaking authors are genuine in their embrace of multiculturalism and commitment to a non-racist South Africa, and what’s more, they succeed in their presentation of such a harmonious nation. He even uses Frantz Fanon as justification for the white author’s use of other cultures, writing, “Reviving precolonial myths, [Fanon] said, rehabilitates the nation and serves as a justification for a future national culture” (102). It is perhaps unsurprising that Jenkins must paraphrase Fanon’s meaning and is unable to directly quote from the author of The Wretched of the Earth. Jenkins’s frequent disparagements of MacCann and Maddy’s work throughout the book—at one point he writes that, “As with so much of the criticism of MacCann and Maddy, it is difficult to recognize the books in their critique of them” (56)—are part of a running debate that began with Maddy and MacCann’s 1996 critique, in African Images in Juvenile Literature: Commentaries on Neocolonialist Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland), of Jenkins’s 1993 work, Children of the Sun: Selected Writers and Themes in South African Children’s Literature (Johannesburg: Ravan). Clearly, it is a debate relished by the publishers of children’s literature criticism, as McFarland and Routledge have both now produced volumes of their criticism, first by MacCann and Maddy, followed by one from Jenkins. The defensiveness displayed by Jenkins seems to be a part of his larger campaign of “hankering after authenticity,” extended beyond authors of children’s literature to children’s literature critics. Throughout the book he praises white South African critics and suggests that outsiders cannot truly understand the “complex society” (xvi) of South Africa. This is a debate that parallels the continuing conflict about whether white authors can ever speak for non-white people, and is one that is of pertinence to all children’s literature critics. National Character in South African English Children’s Literature takes conflicting positions on these two debates. Jenkins’s book argues on the one hand that white, English-speaking South Africans are authentic South Africans (and can therefore speak for any other South African, black or white) and on the other that only South Africans can truly understand their own nation. English-language South African children’s literature (and its criticism), according to Jenkins, is both unique from and the same as other literature (other South African literature and other colonial literature). This paradox is perhaps one reason that National Character in South African English Children’s Literature has no conclusion. In order to create national character, Jenkins depicts a nation that ultimately mistrusts the individualism necessary for nationhood in favor of homogeneous harmony. Karen Sands-O’Connor |