Thomas Pringle arrived in South Africa as an immigrant from Britain in 1820. Dutch colonialism drew South Africa, its indigenous people, and those brought to Africa's shores as slaves, into a developing international economic system that extended from Europe to the Far East, the Americas and later drew in Australia and New Zealand.
Add to these, two anthologies edited, essay collections, innumerable single essays, addresses, awards and a Nobel Prize nomination for literature and what emerges is to many the Dean of African Letters, writes Peter Thuynsma, a leading Mphahlele scholar, in Perspectives on South African English Literature (1992: 221).