Afrikaans literature

Afrikaans literature is literature written in Afrikaans. Afrikaans is the daughter language of 17th-century Dutch and is spoken by the majority of people in the Western Cape of South Africa and among Afrikaners and Coloured South Africans in other parts of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. Afrikaans was historically one of the two official languages of South Africa, the other being English, but it currently shares the status of an "official language" with ten other languages.^[1]

Such was the opposition of the Afrikaner intelligentsia to the White Supremacist National Party and to Apartheid that, in an interview later in his life, Afrikaner poet Uys Krige said, "One of the biggest mistakes is to identify the Afrikaans language with the Nationalist Party."^[2]

Other important Afrikaans poets and authors are André P. Brink, Ingrid Jonker, Eugène Marais, Marie Linde, N.P. van Wyk Louw, Deon Meyer, Dalene Matthee, Hennie Aucamp, Bonaventure Hinwood, and Joan Hambidge.