Abstract
The quotation is from Harry Bloom’s Episode in the Transvaal. It occurs almost as an aside to the musings of Lieutenant Swanepoel who is reflecting on the threat to his career in the police force, in international sport as a rugby player, and as a prospective husband, because of rumours that his sister is not white. But these reflections are shortlived: self pity has to be postponed in the interests of an overriding need to act, since a ‘riot’ supervenes in the ‘location’ (that area on the outskirts of every South African town to which blacks are legally and compulsorily segregated). Swanepoel is responsible for the ‘restoration of law and order’.
An expanded version of a paper read originally at The African Studies Center, UCLA, 1971.
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Notes
Harry Bloom, Transvaal Episode, (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1959) p. 200.
For useful bibliographical material, see Donald J. Weinstock, ‘The Two Boer Wars and the Jameson Raid’, in Research in African Literatures, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1971) pp. 39–43 for novels in Dutch and Afrikaans, and, again, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1972) pp. 60–7, for novels in English.
Francis Brett Young ’south African literature’, The London Mercury, vol. XIX, no. 113 (March 1929).
Laurens van der Post, In a Province (New York: Coward and McCann, 1934) pp. 258–9.
In P. Wastberg (ed.), The Writer in Modern Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Corporation, 1969) p. 24.
John Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975).
William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe (London: Hogarth Press, 1965).
Dan Jacobson, A Dance in the Sun (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1956).
Dan Jacobson, The Evidence of Love (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960).
Peter Abrahams, Wild Conquest (New York: Harper, 1952).
Peter Abrahams, Return to Goli (London: Faber & Faber, 1953).
Alex la Guma, A Walk in the Night (Ibadan, Nigeria: Mbari Publications, 1962; London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967).
Alex la Guma, And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1964).
Alex la Guma, The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1967).
Alex la Guma, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972).
David Rabkin, ‘La Guma and Reality in South Africa’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. VIII, no. 1 (June 1973) p. 66.
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© 1978 Kenneth Parker
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Parker, K. (1978). The South African Novel in English. In: Parker, K. (eds) The South African Novel in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03689-9_1
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