Lineages of Hope and Despair
Lineages of Hope and Despair
Literary and political expressions of the liberal dream of freedom from the 1880s to the 1970s are analysed in the opening chapter. The liberal dream’s lineage in political discourse is analysed in Cecil John Rhodes’s dreams of unifying South Africa in the 1890s; Olive Schreiner’s political journalism from the 1880s to the 1910s; the ANC’s Bill of Rights of 1923; H. Selby Msimang’s pamphlet The Crisis (1936); R. F. A. Hoernlé’s lectures South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (1939); the ANC’s African Claims in South Africa (1943); the ANC’s Freedom Charter (1955); and the Liberal Party’s Blueprint for South Africa (1958). In juxtaposition with these political texts, the following literary texts articulating the liberal dream of freedom are analysed: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890); J. A. D. Smith’s The Great Southern Revolution (1893); Archibald Lamont’s South Africa in Mars (1923); George Heaton Nicholls’s Bayete! (1923); S. E. K. Mqhayi’s U-Don Jadu (1929); Arthur Keppel-Jones’s When Smuts Goes (1947); Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Lewis Sowden’s Tomorrow’s Comet (1951); Garry Allighan’s Verwoerd—The End (1961); Anthony Delius’s The Day Natal Took Off (1963); Karel Schoeman’s The Promised Land (1972); and Jordan Ngubane’s Ushaba: The Hurtle to Blood River (1974).
Keywords: ANC (African National Congress), Liberalism, South Africa, Olive Schreiner, Cecil John Rhodes, S. E. K. Mqhayi, Alan Paton, Freedom Charter
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
