Sarah Millin

Sarah Gertrude Millin, née Liebson (19 March 1889 – 6 July 1968), was a South African author.

Quotes

The Dark River (1919)

• ...the fruit of the vice, the folly, the thoughtlessness of the white man. In the old days - taking one aspect of the matter - there were colonists who, like the Biblical patriarchs or monarchs, had their official and their unofficial households, their white wives and their Hottentot hand-maids. But they used their slave-women as Abraham used Hagar rather than as Solomon used the Shulamite.

God's Stepchildren (1924)

• We are all God's children.....Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren.

The South Africans (1926)

• And yet the less civilised white peasant of Europe is to this extent the coloured man's superior: the blood in him is stronger for advancement.

• Given the opportunity, the descendant of serfs may be a Tchekov. But the child of colour, unless his colour is attenuated to the verge of vanishing point, does not seem to have in him the ability to rise. It is as if the offspring of the originally mixed unions had, through generations, and through circumscription of life and interbreeding, achieved a definite, inferior, and static race: a race not given to wildness (its mothers were savages, but they were slaves); a race with something old and civilised about it (its fathers were Europeans); a race made up of weak materials and without the capacity for spiritual or intellectual growth.

• There are some who suggest that mixed breeds, unless replenished in a generation or two with the blood of one of the original stocks, tend to die out.
  • p. 60

King of Bastards (1950)

• ....the whites are the conquerors and all is theirs. A man's one hope is among the whites.... The thing for the Buys-volk to do is to get back to the whites.

External links

• The Coloured Stereotype in South African Literature