South African poetry is best known for his "Unto Dust" and "In the Withaak's Shade", capturing a portrait of Afrikaner storytelling skills and social attitudes. Bosman also wrote poetry, with a predominantly satirical tone. Alan Paton’s world-renowned and highly poetic novel "Cry, The Beloved Country", came into publication, just four months after the separatist National Party came to power in South Africa. Although Paton was most prolific in other literary genre, poetry was a form that interested him throughout his life, as documented in Peter Alexander's biography of him. Some of the best known poets of this violently oppressive and politically turbulent period
Beloved (novel) trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that "Beloved" is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to "Beloved", "sixty million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade