Anti-apartheid first?

What is the first anti-apartheid novel?

Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country (1948) was my starting point.

We were having an argument at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, which commemorates the days when this city was known as the Johannesburg of America for the severity of its segregation laws.

Survivors of the struggle have been gathering this weekend for the creation of a 'national monument' today of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young girls died in a 1963 bombing which did more than any other white supremacist crime to bring the end of legally enforced segregation here.

The Institute does not offer much in the way of fictional memorials to the Civil Rights movement. I hope to find more suggestions as to what I might read.

As for the South African anti-apartheid pioneers, whose own victory took a litle longer, I discover that the London bookseller, Peter Ellis, offers a much older campaigning novel than Paton's.

In his latest catalogue he puts forward the name the name of 'Drifting to Destruction' by a certain Sydney G. Attwell, published in 1927.

In the foreword Attwell writes: "In this narrative I have ventured to predict the awful consequences if the present policy of the South African whites is not altered".

He later apparently emigrated to New Zealand "because of the dark outlook".

Ellis's copy bears two publishing marks from 1927 - of Henry Walker and of Ouseley.

The only other copy that I have been able to track - being reluctant to pay Mr Ellis his £125 without further investigation - is in Trinity College, Dublin.

Doubtless there are others - though a cursory look from here has not found one nor much in the way of information.

There is a total Google blank - although Attwell, it seems, also published a hand-printed book six years later called Kyamdaka.

Does anyone know any more?

Comments

[Frank Wilson]

One of the girls killed by that bomb, Denise McNair, was a close friend of Condoleezza Rice.

[Ralph Luker]

Peter, if I may, you may have the spelling of Atwell's name wrong. Try it with one t and you may get more information.

[peter stothard]

. . i have tried atwell with one t to no better results. . but thanks to mr luker and his history news network (http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/22058.html) for asking about for more help. . .

[Roger Allen]

You could argue that Olive Schreiner saw and warned against apartheid.
Another anti-apartheid novel from the 1920s is Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer. After he had published it Plomer left South Africa and did not go back for forty years, when he wrote some fine poems about his experience, including A Taste of the Fruit one of the great elegies of the twentieth century.

[peter stothard]

. . . thanks mr allen. . .i have not read Turbott Wolfe. . .that must make me part of what Nadine Gordimer describes in my new paperback edition as 'an inexplicable lapse on the part of literary scholars and critics'. . a lapse that I intend to correct as soon as i can. .