Adam Small's 'What About De Lô' - Dr Emma Barnes (University of Salford)

Dr. Emma Barnes from the University of Salford analyses an English translation of Adam Small’s poem ‘What About de Lô’ (What About the Law), focusing on its critique of apartheid laws that criminalised interracial relationships. Small wrote poetry in Kaaps (a linguistic variety of Afrikaans spoken by “Coloured”* Afrikaners in the Cape). This pioneering strategy challenged the racial designation of Afrikaans as a “white” language and the dominance of the white Afrikaans literary tradition (Devarenne, 2010). In engaging with the poem in translation (and the problems this entails), Dr. Barnes brings Small’s work to a wider Anglophone audience, undertaking a sustained close reading of ‘What about de Lô’ to explain how the structure, syntax and layout reflect the forced separation of races under apartheid, as in the case of the fictional interracial couple represented in poem.

*note that the term ‘coloured’ has a specific history and contested meaning in contemporary South Africa. It was originally used to refer to people of mixed-race descent predominantly based in the Cape, was deployed as legally defined racial classification during the apartheid era, and forms one of a number of racial categories with a continued use, presence and power over South African lives (See Erasmus 2017).

Further Reading

Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Ohio University Press, 2005)

Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)

Charles Badenhorst, Animation of Adam Small’s ‘What about de Lô’ [Accessed 28/05/25]

Nicole Devarenne, ‘The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45.3 (2010), 389-408

Zimitri Erasmus, Race Otherwise: Forging A New Humanism for South Africa (Wits University Press, 2017)

Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Routledge, 2019)

Hannah Helm, Emma Barnes, Katie Barnes and Jade Munslow Ong, ‘“Make them roll in their graves”: South African Writing, Decolonisation, and the English Literature A-Level’, English in Education 54.2 (2024), 108-122

Adam Small, ‘What abou’ de lô’ in Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry, ed. by F. M. Chipasula (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 251-253

---, ‘What abou’ de lô’ in Dirk J. Smit, ‘Law and Morality? Some Theological Perspectives’, Scriptura 101.1, 341–351