Her novel “The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena” was compared to Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” in arousing white opinion against apartheid. She had Covid-19.
Elsa Joubert belonged to a group of dissident writers in Afrikaans who called themselves “Die Sestigers” (the Sixtyers, or writers of the 1960s).
Elsa Joubert, one of South Africa’s best-known writers in the Afrikaans language, whose apartheid-era novel “The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena” opened the eyes of many white South Africans to the harsh treatment that the black majority had been enduring largely out of their sight, died on June 14 in Cape Town. She was 97.
She had received a diagnosis of Covid-19, her son, Nico Steytler, told South African news media.
Ms. Joubert belonged to a group of dissident writers in Afrikaans — a language derived from the 17th-century Dutch spoken by South Arica’s first white settlers — who called themselves “Die Sestigers” (the Sixtyers, or writers of the 1960s).
Source: nytimes.com
