Pharaoh's Sjambok

This essay brings into a single focus two phenomena of the first half of the 20th century: the globalization of certain South African words; and the emigration of some of its major poets. The interest is then to track the use—or, conversely, significant non‐use—of these words in the work of those same writers. Attention is given first to the resonance of sjambok in Roy Campbell’s “Vespers on the Nile”. Trek is then examined for its burgeoning extension of meaning in a wide range of English contexts; for its dramatic appearance in a poem by Wilfred Owen (much quoted by Campbell); and for its variously negative and positive charges in the tribal polemics of the white South African state. F.T. Prince is adduced as the revealing counter‐example of a poet who is not known for his use of specifically South African words and in whose work the only exception to that rule is a little‐known horticultural word that has never migrated. The essay ends with some reflections upon the falling out of use of most of the old words lovingly connoting the landscape of pre‐industrial South Africa—and its obverse: namely, the long life assured to another (newer, utterly loveless) word from that territory: apartheid

Aesthetics · Art · Emigration · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic · Focus (optics · Globalization · Literature · Meaning (existential · Poetry · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · South African History and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy

• What good is anthropology

  Open Access•Nolwazi Mkhwanazi•American Ethnologist•2024

  Add to list