![]() ![]() ![]() Therefore all resemblance between the characters and incidents in this book and people and situations outside is strictly coincidental.Ī Dry White Season was, of course, banned in South Africa, but it had already been published in Great Britain, and underground editions circulated in the same way that Soviet samizdat did. It is not the surface reality which is important but the patterns and relationships underneath the surface. But separate events and people have been recast in the context of a novel, in which they exist as fiction only. Nothing in this novel has been invented, and the climate, history and circumstances from which it arises are those of South Africa today. ![]() ![]() In retrospect, readers know that the novel reveals a true picture of the SA security service, but for readers in the era before political reform, the disclaimer on the verso page spelled it out: When we think of repression and surveillance, we tend to think of East Germany and the old Soviet States, but Brink’s brave novel A Dry White Season (1979) reminds us that it’s not so very long ago that South Africa had a brutally efficient system of repression too. If South Africa had an equivalent to Israel’s Righteous Among Nations – gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis – White South African André Brink (1935-2015) would be honoured for his courage in challenging apartheid through his books. ![]()
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