Between The Sjambok and the Bantu World

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the English short stories that the Zulu-language writer Rolfes Dhlomo published in the two South African magazines The Sjambok and the Bantu World between the late 1920s and the 1930s. It discusses how these publishing venues, directed at a ‘European’ and ‘African’ readership respectively, shaped Dhlomo’s short fiction in very different ways at the level of form and content. It also highlights the pivotal role played by the press and the influence it exerted on definitions of the ‘literary’ for creative writing by Black writers in the 1930s. Ultimately, this chapter raises some questions about the ambivalent stance of the writer—as a mission-educated New African intellectual—towards modernity and the role of the English language.