The author's use of 'rotten English'—a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and idiomatic English—makes this a unique and powerful novel.

    Johannesburg; Jonathan Ball, 1985. Hardcover, 286 pages. "Herman Charles Bosman (February 3, 1905 ­ October 14, 1951) is the South African writer widely regarded as South Africa's greatest short story writer. He studied the works of Edgar Alan Poe and Mark Twain, and developed a style emphasizing the use of irony. His English-language works utilize primarily Afrikaner characters and point to the many contradictions of Afrikaner society in the first half of the twentieth century. The poet Roy Campbell called him "the only literary genius that South Africa has produced." - Wikipedia