ABSTRACT
Few people outside South Africa will have heard of, let alone read, the works of the Afrikaner novelist, C. H. Kuhn. The charges range from racialism to total disrespect for the African, a biased portrayal of the blackman by a white author who could only see Africans as noble savages, buffoons or bungling fools suspended acculturatively. Toiings too is found to be objectionable within the South African context by those people who, on the basis of their level of consciousness, reject a taxonomy which relegates them to being ‘coloured’. Mphahlele, the South African, and other West African critics and students have succeeded in diawing attention to an important and essential element in humour, namely the observer, the audience, or the silent participant. Realism for the dispossessed means apartheid; deprivation: physically, culturally and mentally. Realism means being a non-person, existing by the grace of the whites.
