ABSTRACT
A trickle of white immigrants from abroad made their way to South Africa’s cities in early children’s books. In 1926, Dorothea Fairbridge’s immigrant squirrel taught his children of their right to be South Africans. 1 The greatest immigration to the cities was the internal movement of millions of black people and Afrikaners to the cities after the Second World War. In the case of Afrikaners, this led to a marked shift in the setting of their children’s literature. The black migration has featured often in English literature and films, but only rarely in juvenile literature. By the 1970s, the spiritual homeland of white English speakers, already urban dwellers, had shifted forever from the Karoo and the bushveld to the cities, and its youth literature followed it there, though slowly: of the English juvenile books published in South Africa in 1990, 30% had an urban setting. 2
