Wanted: existing creative texts written in Kaaps or Afrikaaps. Such poems, recordings of spoken word poetry, short stories, books, TikTok poems, radio and television dramas and music will be included in a comprehensive free electronic database of underrepresented African languages, as part of the African Literary Metadata initiative (ALMEDA). So says ALMEDA collaborator Dr Riaan Oppelt, a lecturer in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University (SU).
ALMEDA is a project of Uppsala University in Sweden and is funded by the European Research Council. It is creating a searchable metadata database of creative texts written in underrepresented African languages such as Sheng (a hybrid language spoken in Nairobi in Kenya and parts of Tanzania), Swahili and Shona. The effort will make such texts more readily and freely accessible to researchers, other creatives, and the public.
About the value of including creative texts in Afrikaaps or Kaaps into the ALMEDA database, Dr Oppelt says: “Afrikaaps has in recent years received wide recognition thanks to efforts of many artists and academics. It is increasingly being used in many more books, poetry volumes, films, television series and music productions than before. It is therefore timeous to start building up a comprehensive record of what is available in different mediums.
“The difficulty is that literature works in Afrikaaps or Kaaps are still often only classified or listed under Afrikaans. This makes it difficult to track down such texts, especially if you are a reader from beyond the borders of South Africa who rely on international cataloguing systems that do not so specifically use it as a search key or tag," he notes.
Search for “missing" texts"
Dr Oppelt says he is not only interested in more recent texts but is also searching for so-called “missing" older texts that have so far gone unnoticed. He is therefore scouring local archives for leads. He has already had some success, finding magazine short fiction in the archives of the Dutch Reformed Church in which some of the characters speak Afrikaaps.
“Although these stories were probably not written back then by speakers of Afrikaaps, they are still important sources of reference about the vocabulary used in those days," he adds.
ALMEDA Project
Dr Oppelt visited Uppsala University late last year and among others presented a lecture on the Afrikaaps side of the ALMEDA project. He has been collaborating on the project since 2022, after meeting project lead, Zimbabwean-born Prof Ashleigh Harris of Uppsala University, when she was visiting Stellenbosch University. Dr Oppelt says he was impressed by her passion for African languages.
“While English-language novels by some African authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo and Abdulrazak Gurnah circulate globally, materials written in African languages and vernaculars are seldom translated and often only circulated locally," says Prof Harris, who has been associated with Uppsala University for the past 20 years. “Many people living in Africa find published novels restrictively expensive. They are likely to spend their leisure time engaging with informal, ephemeral, and not-for-profit literary and oral forms, such as spoken-word poetry, street theatre, radio dramas, and various online genres. The ALMEDA project is creating a Linked Open Data repository on these forms. It catalogues their existence, and makes them searchable and accessible to interested users."
To add texts in Kaaps or Afrikaaps to the database, or for more information on the project, contact Dr Riaan Oppelt at roppelt@sun.ac.za.
