With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Hoping to make his way as a writer he faced considerable challenges as a South African as Carol Polsgrove has shown in her history Ending British Rule: Writers in a Common Cause (2009). His novel Mine Boy (1946) one of the first works to bring him to critical attention and his memoir Tell Freedom (1954) deal in part with apartheid.