The Evidence of Love

by Dan Jacobson

Kenneth Makeer - intelligent, South African and black - travels to London to study law where he meets a fellow South African - a white girl - whom he eventually marries. Yet mixed marriages are outlawed in the Union, and so when they return home they come face to face with racial intolerance and hatred at its most brutal.

This is a passionate, harrowing and dramatic story, written at a time of deep racial tensions, which hurtles towards its ugly and untimely conclusion.

218 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Dan Jacobson (born March 7, 1929 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is a novelist, short story writer, critic and essayist. He has lived in Great Britain for most of his adult life, and for many years held a professorship in the English Department at University College London. He has also spent periods as a visiting writer or a guest-professor at universities in the United States, Australia, and South Africa, and has given lectures and readings in many other countries.

His early novels, including The Trap, his first published novel, focus on South African themes. His later works have been various in kind: they include works of fantasy and fictional treatments of historical episodes, as well as memoirs, critical essays, and travel books. Among the awards and prizes he has received are the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1959 (A Long Way from London and Other Stories); Somerset Maugham Award 1964 (Time of Arrival and Other Essays); The Jewish Chronicle Award 1977 (The Confessions of Josef Baisz); the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography 1986 (Time and Time Again). In the year 2000 he edited and translated from the Dutch Een mond vol Glas by Henk van Woerden, an imaginative re-creation of the circumstances leading to the assassination of a South African president, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, in the country's House of Assembly.

Dan Jacobson has received an Honorary D. Litt. from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and on retirement from his position at University College London was elected a Fellow of the college. Collections of his papers can be found at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austen, Texas; Oxford University, England; and, in South Africa, at Witwatersrand University Library, Johannesburg, the National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, and the Africana Museum, Kimberley.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early novel by South African fiction writer Dan Jacobson chronicles the life of Kenneth Makeer, a black man whose skin is light enough to "pass for" white. Through good fortune he acquires a benefactor who pays for his education and makes it possible for him to study law in London. While in London he becomes involved with a white South African, Isabel Last. Knowing the specific danger they face, they marry and return to South Africa, where both are imprisoned under the Immorality Act, a real law of Apartheid South Africa that criminalized sexual relations between whites and non-whites. The Evidence of Love is an effective and touching love story that is also a convincing portrayal of the struggle of South African blacks and their white sympathizers to endure an oppressive society and yet overcome its absurd restrictions.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very powerful novel set in the late 1950s. Starkly illuminates the horror, pointlessness and cruelty of apartheid and how it corrupted and debased everyone and everything it touched

[Oisín Bambi II · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful. Couldn't finish, if this book redeems itself in its final 20 pages then it must contain a in narrative Short Story.