SOURCE: Alexander, Peter F. “An Archetypal Anti-Apartheid Novel: The Writing of Turbott Wolfe.” Durham University Journal 81, no. 2 (June 1989): 281-87.

In the following essay, Alexander suggests that William Plomer's novel Turbott Wolfe, which caused an antipathetic reaction among its white readership when it was first published in 1925, was prescient in its anti-segregationist attitudes and paved the way for such anti-apartheid novels as Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing, Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope, Nadine Gordimer's Occasion for Loving, and the first Afrikaans novel to be banned in South Africa, André Brink's Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness).

Plomer, 'twas you who, though a boy in age,                     Awoke a sleepy continent to rage,                     Who dared alone to thrash a craven race                     And hold a mirror to its dirty face. 

(Roy Campbell: The Wayzgoose)

Roy Campbell was referring, in the rather grandiloquent style he often affected in his satires...