Drought and the South African Imagination: Selected Readings

Abstract

Both the work of a number of poets and novelists and the popular discourse of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries epitomise the fascination which drought continues to hold for the South African imagination. They also embody the environmental humanities principle that “environment” is inseparable from “society.” If, as has recently been argued, our literature is continuous with San orature, then our memory of drought covers millennia. A selective account of texts from the 1820s to the early twentieth century illustrates this continuity, as well as the complexity and controversy of the issue. In conclusion, 1933 was in popular memory the year of a “great drought,” anticipated by Francis Carey Slater and responded to by W. A. Kingon, C. M. van den Heever and, most powerfully, Eugène Marais.

Keywords: Drought, South African literature, Eugène Marais