Race and Fiction: God’s Stepchildren and Turbott Wolfe

Abstract

In God’s Stepchildren, published in 1924, Sarah Gertrude Millin wrote of the British attitude to the ‘colour problem’:

… colour was so rare a thing [there] that it was only a matter of casual consequence: the ordinary person did not think of it, or brood over it, or consider it, or understand it.¹

This article was written by Dr David Rabkin as a chapter in an uncompleted study of South African fiction, before he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in 1976 under the provisions of the South African ‘Terrorism Act’. He is serving his sentence in Pretoria Prison. The chapter has been very slightly edited by Arthur Ravenscroft for publication as an article.