LANCE SPEARMAN is a nattily dressed detective who sports a straw hat, bowtie and goatee. He likes Scotch on the rocks, buxom women, El Greco cheroots, and fast cars. He uses reverse karate kicks, his fists, and a hand gun to bring down such enemies as Zollo, the Mermolls, and Countess Scarlett. He is the black James Bond and the most popular fictional character in Africa today. In almost every English-speaking town of Africa, young men, most with no more than five years of schooling, sit on the sidewalks and read the weekly picture magazines that chronicle the adventures of Lance Spearman and other heroes like Fearless Fang, who is the black facsimile of Tarzan, or the Stranger, who is the black Lone Ranger. In Kenya, for example, the adventures of Lance Spearman have a greater circulation than any of the daily newspapers. This phenomenon of popular culture suggests a good deal about the tastes of ordinary semi-educated young men in the African towns — their yearning, their uncertain identification with the fringes of Western culture, their need for fancy in a harsh urban world. The magazines are known in the publishing trade as "look-reads." In effect they are photographed comics that resemble comic books, except that the action is photographed instead of drawn. Little balloons of dialogue appear over the heads of the characters...

The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing. The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa. To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa...

Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...