The English-speaking whites of South Africa participate in the larger culture of the English-speaking world while rejecting its unspoken consensual positions on many basic issues. This study analyses texts of different kinds produced by the group to examine the way these deviant English-speakers see themselves, and particularly how this self-image is influenced by the presence of the blacks who constitute a crucial part of their perceptual field.

Economically powerful but politically marginal for many years, the English-speaking whites have always been mediators of their community's experience to the world culture of the English language. This study shows how the act of mediation operates in more than one direction, producing a literary tradition that is essentially - and perhaps surprisingly - dissident