ABSTRACT
Born in Durban in 1901, the South African poet Roy Campbell left home for Oxford University in 1918. After seven years in Europe, Campbell returned to South Africa to join forces with the Afrikaner writer Laurens van der Post whose sense of humanity had been shaken by racial prejudice, and William Plomer, the author of Turbott Wolfe (1925), a novel of inter-racial love, to launch Voorslag (Whiplash) in 1926. The political ideology behind the magazine was to “sting with satire the mental hindquarters of the bovine citizenry of the Union” and to provide a platform for writers who wrote either in Afrikaans or English. While the first volume printed some of Campbell’s best poems, it was Plomer who caused a furor by writing provocatively about racial intolerance and discrimination.
