Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Arts, 2000 / This thesis explores in empirical fashion the contribution made by St Peter's Secondary School to South African literary history. It takes as its starting point the phenomenon of the first black autobiographies having been published within a ten-year period from 1954 to 1963, with all but one of the male writers receiving at least part of their post-primary schooling at St Peter's School in Johannesburg. Among the texts, repositioned here within their educational context, are Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams, Down Second Avenue by Es'kia Mphahlele, Road to Ghana by Alfred Hutchinson, and Chocolates for My Wife by Todd Matshikiza. The thesis examines the educational milieu of the inter-war years in the Transvaal over and against education in the other provinces of the Union, the Anglo-Catholic ethos of the Community of the Resurrection who established and ran the school, the pedagogical environment of St Peter's School, and the autobiographical texts themselves, in order to plot the course which the autobiographers' subsequent lives took as they wrote back to the education which had both liberated and shackled them. It equipped them far in advance of the opportunities available to them under the colour bar, necessitating exile, even as it colonised their minds in a way perhaps spared those who never attended school, requiring a continual reassessment of their identity over time. The thesis argues that their Western education was crucial in the development of their hybrid identity, what Es'kia Mphahlele has termed `the dialogue of two selves', which was in each case worked out through an autobiography. The typical, if simplified, trajectory is an enthusiastic espousal of the culture of the West encountered in their schooling at St Peter's, and then a rejection out of a sense of betrayal in favour of Africa, eventually leading to a synthesis of the two. The thesis concludes that it was the emphasis on all-round education and character formation, in the British boarding school tradition, with its thrust of sacrifice and service, which helped to fashion the strong belief systems of Abrahams and Mphahlele's later years, namely Christian socialism and African humanism, which inform their mature writings.

In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new South African nationhood. Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist, conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony. In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I". / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

In this thesis, I examine a critical procedure appropriate to Black South African autobiography of the 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I examine these autobiographies as examples of counterhegemonic writing in which the self counters the hegemonic apartheid notion of identity, based on racial and cultural purity, and I propose that the hybrid selves encoded in these narratives have the capacity to inform a new South African nationhood. Chapter One necessitates an autocritique, in which I locate my own discourse within the intersecting discursive strands of Western and local theory, an effort that is guided by the imperatives that emerge from the autobiographies themselves. In Chapter Two, I suggest that the postcolonial autos displaces Humanist, and appropriates postmodernist, conceptions of the "I". Rewriting the terms of the autobiographical pact, the authority of grapos is re-instated in counternarratives that give privileged status to the bios - to lives that claim "I AM!" and selves that reconstruct identity. A related concern is the relationship between autobiographical criticism in South Africa and hegemony. In the chapters that follow, I examine the various ways in which counterhegemonic selves are constructed in Tell freedom, Down Second Avenue, Drawn in colour: African Contrasts and The Ochre People. Peter Abrahams's autobiography is discussed largely in terms of Frantz Fanon's insights on identity construction and the notion of a "hybrid I". Es'kia Mphahlek's (re)writing of the self - whose main feature is ambivalence - forms the focus of Chapter Four. These notions are developed in the final chapter, which focuses on Noni Jabavu's narratives that encode an "in-between" cultural identity and, as in the autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, a metonymic "I". / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)