Within South Africa the writer in opposition must wrestle with his own purposes as intensely as he does against the system. In these essays written over 15 years, a prizewinning Afrikaner novelist illuminates the relationship between art and moral commitment, exploring the distortion of truth in South African society, the perpetuation of the master-slave relationship, the failure of censorship to extinguish "the rumour of freedom." His role, as he sees it, lies in "countering the tactics of secrecy with exposure: the dark fears nothing quite so much as the light."