SOURCE: Parker, Kenneth. “Apartheid and the Politics of Literature.” Red Letters 20 (December 1986): 12-33.

In the following essay, Parker discusses liberal and Marxist resistance to the apartheid state as represented in the writings of Alex La Guma, Bessie Head, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, and Nelson Mandela, among others.

All recent evidence—the events themselves, the pronouncements about them, the speculations about outcomes, the re-adjustments by the main actors—point inexorably to one inescapable future: that the apartheid state which has existed in more or less its present form since 1948 (and has its antecedents in policies of domination based on class, colour and caste dating from the mid-seventeenth century) will soon be replaced. The manner of replacement, when and by whom have become crucial questions because the apartheid minority white regime also exercises a regional hegemony over other states on the subcontinent, acting partly on its own account and partly...