South Africa has three great contributions to make to world children's literature: the folktales of its peoples; books about its magnificent animals, plant kingdoms and landscapes; and stories which document, grieve over, and celebrate our history.

Children's literature, whether spoken or written, has been produced in every period of South African history and in all our languages. Perhaps visitors will find at least something that resonates with their own countries’ experiences: the oral literature of pre-colonial Africa; the literature of colonialism, colonial wars, and neo-colonialism; civil wars; the repressions of harsh regimes; revolution, emergence from colonialism, and the building of a new democracy for the twenty-first century. I am going to share with you some of this literature written in English.

There must have been something special about the mix of humans, animals and physical setting in South Africa that inspired the very first written children's literature in English set in this country to tackle four great rights – human rights, children's rights, animal rights, and the right to freedom from religious persecution. Sadly, this early flowering of liberal writing was followed by a century or more of mostly undistinguished children's literature that never touched on these issues.

The first children's poem in English set in South Africa was written by an Englishman, Isaac Taylor (1820), in which he deplored the hunting of ostriches for slaughter and captivity in zoos. The ostrich hen says to her mate:

The next South African English children's poem was a satire, written in this country by an immigrant Scottish lawyer, Thomas Pringle, in 1834, “for juvenile readers”, which fiercely criticised the British and the Cape Dutch for massacring indigenous people and plundering their villages (see Chapter 4):

One of the first novels to be set in this country was a children's novel, The English Boy at the Cape, written by an Englishman, Edward Kendall, and published in 1835 (Kendall 1835).