Dilemmas of the Afrikaans Writer

Andre Brink is a leading South African writer, one of the courageous group that has spoken out against racial injustice. The author of such novels as Looking on Darkness, A Dry White Season, and A Chain of Voices, he has twice been awarded the most important South African literary prize, the CNA award—the only author to receive it both for Afrikaans and English work. In 1980 he received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. The article that follows is taken from Mr. Brink’s new collection of critical pieces entitled Writing in a State of Siege, © 1984 by Andre Brink, and published in the United States by Summit Books, with whose kind permission it appears in our pages. Mr. Brink has written that in selecting the essays for his book, he found that “a world where more and more violence is solving fewer and fewer problems makes the writer not less, but more, necessary.”– Eds.

If the position of ...