Afrikaans SF
Entry updated 17 February 2025. Tagged: International.
Only four texts by writers of Afrikaans Speculative Fiction, strictly understood, had been translated into English as of 2024. The Afrikaans language, rooted in South Africa and spoken by descendants of Dutch, German, and French colonists, is one of that country's eleven official languages, recognized as such in 1925. European presence in South Africa reaches back to the mid-fifteenth century, intensifying in the mid-seventeenth century, when the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English were looking for routes to the East, intent on securing their share of the developing spice trade and other resources. Afrikaans itself evolved from seventeenth-century Dutch but was also influenced by the language spoken by the indigenous Khoisan people and slaves brought over from Asia and other African countries.
The first work of Afrikaans sf to be translated into English is August van Oordt's Seuns van die Wolke (1931; trans van Oordt as Sons of the Clouds 1981). A positive vision of future South Africa, it imagines life in 2034 when most people rely on aviation for Transportation to and from work and entertainment. Written before the widespread adoption of telephones and long before television came to South Africa in the 1970s, Seuns van die Wolke also features automated hotels and electricity without power lines. Very little information is available about this novel, but one can find a brief review on the site Afrifiksie.nova.com. Oordt's imaginative world must have been popular with Afrikaans readers, since it went into a seventh printing.
The next two works of Afrikaans sf came out in 2016 and 2017; both imagine a world diametrically opposed to Oordt's hopeful vision. Eben Venter's post-apocalyptic (see Post-Holocaust) novel Horrelpoot (2006; trans Luke Stubbs as Trencherman 2008) is the story of one man's journey across South Africa to find his nephew and return him to Australia. Along the way, Marlouw – for more on the relationship between this novel and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902), see the entry on Venter – is confronted by terrible poverty, widespread AIDS, and a complete collapse of basic infrastructure. He hears that his nephew is holed up on the family farm and believes that he is ruling an empire (calling himself the "King of Meat"). Marlouw must make his way to this farm and fulfil the promise he made to his sister.
Deon Meyer's Koors (2016; trans K L Seegers as Fever 2017) imagines a similar hellish landscape, only here AIDS has become an airborne Pandemic and killed off most of the world. In Meyer's novel, it is a father and son (Willem and Nico) who must travel across South Africa together, their goal being to set up a new society where survivors can rebuild civilization. (A similar novel is Christian Guay-Poliquin's Le fil des kilomètres [2013; trans Jacob Homel as Running on Fumes 2016] from Quebec.) Meyer's reputation as a writer of detective thrillers follows him in Fever, with a murder lingering at the heart of the story. As Willem and Nico make their perilous journey across the country, they attract everyone from a former aviator to a pastor.
The only author of Afrikaans speculative fiction to have a short story published in English as of 2024 is Martin Steyn. His tale "Kira" (2016 Skadustemme: kortverhale; trans James D Jenkins as "Kira" in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1, anth 2020 ed James D Jenkins and Ryan Cagle). Like Meyer, Steyn is mostly known for his crime novels. In "Kira", he tells the story of a young lecturer in the Afrikaans-Dutch department at Stellenbosch University who is seduced by the department head. Fleeing to his childhood cabin by a lake to think about how to extricate himself from the complicated relationship, the unnamed narrator encounters a mysterious woman whose name he hears as "Kira". Once more, the narrator finds himself with a woman attempting to seduce him; this time the danger is much more literal since she is apparently a lake-associated Supernatural Creature (see also She) who leads him into the water with the intention of drowning him. Only the intervention of a strange but friendly dog saves the narrator from Kira's grip.
While most speculative fiction in South Africa is written in English, it is hoped that more of that in Afrikaans will be translated in future years. [RSCo]
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