[Ronald Harwood] sprawls, but it is an ever-inquisitive, restless and striking motivation which forces [Articles of Faith] into its heroic size and shape. No lag, nothing redundant. Its indictment is that Cape colonists have for generations, furtively, mixed their blood with that of the Xhosa and Khoikhoi nations, on a scale which makes the current miscegenation laws a humbug….

Harwood displays a society lacerated by sexual guilt. His account of the reduction of the Xhosa and Khoikhoi, dubbed respectively Kaffir and Hottentot by the crude Dutch, is dramatic and deeply moving. The conflict in the book is created by the use of faith as vision and love versus the use of faith as political expediency. The size of the problem is measured against the size of the land. A curious and unforgettable moral and physical panorama is unrolled. Articles of Faith, a splendid novel, is a tragedy about...