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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Literary liberalism: the 'Voorslag' trio in political retrospect
Author:Alexander, Peter F.ISNI
Year:1997
Periodical:Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
Volume:9
Issue:2
Pages:21-35
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:liberalism
writers
literature
Abstract:British liberalism in South Africa in the first decades of the 20th century was much more concerned with Anglicization and ensuring that South Africa would become a loyal part of the empire, than with protecting the rights of blacks. Many whites, both producers and consumers of art, seem to have thought that blacks could not be fitting subjects for artistic scrutiny. The extent to which this remained true until the 1920s is shown by the extraordinarily hostile reception accorded to the writing of the 'Voorslag' (a literary journal produced in South Africa in 1926) trio: William Plomer, Roy Campbell and Laurens Van der Post. Plomer's novel 'Turbott Wolfe' (1926) and his long short story 'Ula Masondi' (1926) were criticized for the central role blacks occupied. Roy Campbell wrote poems in which he depicted blacks as suffering from oppression, and Laurens Van der Post built up a reputation as a notable South African liberal, dedicated to the upliftment of blacks in general and the Bushmen of the Kalahari in particular. A reading of the work of the 'Voorslag' trio suggests that only one of them, Plomer, would today be thought of as being of the liberal camp. Campbell soon repudiated his liberal period, and Van der Post evolved a covert racial hierarchy in which Zulu ranked higher than other Bantu groups, and the Bushman was to be valued above all for his 'primitiveness'. Bibliogr., ref.
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