SOURCE: Ruden, Sarah. “Thoughts on Mda, Ndebele, and Black South African Writing at the Millennium.” Iowa Review 28, no. 2 (summer-fall 1998): 155-66.

In the following essay, Ruden explores some of the difficulties faced by black post-apartheid writers in their critical assessments by both Western scholars and past generations of South African authors.

It is a frequent complaint in South African literary circles that the West is not giving black African literature a chance, because of racial prejudice. Given the adoption of white anti-apartheid writers into the Western canon, the neglect of black writers, both anti—and post-apartheid, is supposed to be a glaringly bigoted slight. As usual, claims about racism oversimplify. There are vast cultural differences that make black African authors—even the black authors writing in English in relatively cosmopolitan South Africa—hard for Americans and Europeans to appreciate. But the danger is that “cultural differences” will become the...