PETER CLARKE

Though violence plays a large part in the works of all these writers, nowhere is it explored with such frightening effect as in the works of four Cape Town writers, Peter Clark, who sometimes uses the pen name of 'Peter Kumalo', Richard Rive, James Matthews, and Alex la Guma. In Peter Clark's "A Death in the Sun" and Richard Rive's "Willyboy", the violence portrayed has gone beyond the physical reality to become a quiet, brooding thing that is a state of mind---of the nationasl mind, even. These stories remind one strongly of books such as Black Boy or Native Son by the American Negro writer, Richard Wright.

-Lewis Nkosi, "South Africa: Protest", Africa Protest, October 1962.