AN AFRICAN TRAGEDY

(A Novel in English by a Zulu Writer).

40 pages, 8vo (195 x 128 mm), original printed brown card wrappers.

\'Rolfes Reginald Raymond Dhlomo (1906-1971) was born near Pietermaritzburg and was the brother of renowned KwaZulu-Natal poet H.I.E. Dhlomo. He worked as a mine clerk in Johannesburg and as a freelance journalist becoming, in 1932, assistant editor of the Bantu World and, in 1943, editor of Ilanga lase Natal. Most of his creative work is in Zulu and consists of historical novels of nineteenth-century Zulu leaders: U-Dingane (1936), U-Shaka (1937), U-Mpande (1938), U-Cetshwayo (1952) and UDinizulu (1968). He wrote a novella An African Tragedy (1928), the first piece of English prose fiction by a black South African to appear in book form and presenting a sombre picture of life in the black urban slums. Under several pseudonyms including \'Rollie Reggie\', \'The Randite\' and \'Pessimist\', he regularly sketched moral tales of life in the mining compounds for Stephen Black\'s magazine The Sjambok (1929-1931) - a selection is to be found in English in Africa (March 1975). In 1946 he returned to the conflict between rural and city ways in the Zulu-language Indlela Yabani (\'The Evil One\'), a narrative depicting the dilemmas of an African in the locations of Johannesburg.\' (From the Companion to South African Literature - Adey, Beeton and Chapman, 1986).