Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps.

Hoping to make his way as a writer he faced considerable challenges as a South African as Carol Polsgrove has shown in her history Ending British Rule: Writers in a Common Cause (2009). His novel Mine Boy (1946) one of the first works to bring him to critical attention and his memoir Tell Freedom (1954) deal in part with apartheid.