Somewhere Inside the Rainbow

“Art must be cathartic, original and memorable,” Alan Twigg writes in his engaging review of The Afrikaner. I heartily thank Alan for his words of appreciation and the thought-provoking reflections on the writer’s freedom to cross cultural, ethnic and racial boundaries. I hope his concluding remarks will bring good luck to the book now that it is out there, in the big world of letters and readers: “North Americans have gleaned a deeper awareness of South Africa through Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. We’ve also seen Invictus or A Dry White Season or Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom about Stephen Biko, the man that Nelson Mandela described as “the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa. The Afrikaner deserves its place in that pantheon.”