Walking the Talk: Reflections on Teaching South African Literature to Foreign Students

What kind of critical apparatus would be needed to best identify the conditions under which Afrikaans literature was produced? What kind of self-understanding could be expected from a historically privileged South African who teaches literature to foreign students? Rather than a formal theoretical critique, this inaugural lecture is a playful, hybrid text that will offer a rhetorically amplified performance in response to these questions. Its central thesis is that walking solves problems. The performance proceeds via a preamble stating these problems, followed by an autobiographical narrative covering several perambulations at dusk, concluding with a post-amble of allegories for reading and teaching literature in turbulent times.