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.

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."

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.

Afrikaans can claim the same literary roots as contemporary Dutch, as both languages stem from 17th-century Dutch. One of the oldest examples of written Cape Dutch is the poem Lied ter eere van de Swellendamsche en diverse andere helden bij de bloedige actie aan Muizenberg in dato 7 August 1795 (Song in Honour of the Swellendam and various others Heroes at the Bloody Action at Muizenberg) while the earliest Afrikaans publications are generally believed to be Zamenspraak tusschen Klaas Waarzegger en Jan Twyfelaar (Conversations between Klaas Waarzegger and Jan Twyfelaar) by L.H. Meurant in 1861 and Uiteensetting van die godsdiens (Exposition of the Religion) by Abu Bakr Effendi in Arabic Afrikaans in 1877.

Even though the roots of the Afrikaans language movement date from 1875, the movement did not spread in a major way until after the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902.

According to literary historian Jack Cope, the first literary works in Afrikaans were born out of the despondent atmosphere that followed the defeat of the two Boer Republics and the systematic British war crimes of the Second Anglo-Boer War. For this reason, the first Afrikaans writers and poets were considered heroes for defending their people, language, and culture against efforts by the British Empire to destroy all three.

Sir Alfred Milner, the Royal Governor of the newly formed Union of South Africa, launched an effort to use both the government and the educational system to force the Afrikaners and Coloured people to switch to English. In response, Afrikaans was standardized as a language and was first used in a standard form in memoirs written by Boer men and women about their experiences in the war. Furthermore, Milner's coercive Anglicization campaign significantly backfired and instead mobilized the Afrikaners to take back control of both the government and the educational system.

Eugène Marais, a morphine addicted poet, scientist, and former journalist whose newspaper criticisms of President Paul Kruger had made him a highly unpopular figure in the Republic of Transvaal, switched from writing in English and Dutch to in Afrikaans during the era that followed the British defeat of the Boer Commandos. As the leader of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, Marais's work was translated into various languages either late in his life or after his death.