An Attempt at Periodizing Recent (Southern African) Afrikaans Poetry (1955-2012)

A perspective is offered on Afrikaans poetry between 1955 and 2012. This literary era overlaps with the socio-political era of Apartheid and the struggle against it, as well as the consequent establishment of democracy in South Africa. An approach based on systems theory is combined with views that South African literature may be seen as a "story-scape" of major discourses. Both intra- and extra-systemic factors have influenced trends in Afrikaans poetry. Pressing Southern African socio-political issues have helped to shape the said Afrikaans poetry era into three distinctive periods. The first may be labelled the "literature of the Sixties" (a belated flowering of modernism in Afrikaans). The "Soweto riots" of 1976 then steered South Africa towards sociopolitical reform. A second poetry period, characterized by tensions between aesthetic and socio-political considerations, therefore covers the years up to the democratic elections of 1994. Since then, discourses like the postcolonial, postmodern and ecological have become centralized.