Peter Dreyer

Who is Peter Dreyer?

Peter Richard Dreyer is the author of A Beast in View, The Future of Treason, A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank, and Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny. He was born and brought up in South Africa, where he was involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, serving on the Cape Provincial Committee of the Liberal Party, founded and led by Alan Paton, and as secretary of the Western Province Press Association, which published the fortnightly The Citizen, which introduced the concept of nonracial democracy in South Africa. At the time, the Liberal Party was the only unsegregated political party in South Africa. The African National Congress restricted its membership to black Africans, and did not desegregate itself until many years later. Dreyer put forward the idea of nonracialism in a pamphlet titled Against Racial Status and Social Segregation. The Citizen Group also worked to establish nonracial trade unions, resistance to bus apartheid in Cape Town, and a nonracial theater project, which led to a production of Jean Genet's The Blacks. On February 8, 1958, Patrick Duncan launched the Liberal Party fortnightly Contact, with offices on Parliament Street in Cape Town. Dreyer worked closely with Duncan, and in Contact, 1, no. 15, dated August 23, 1958, he published an article about the newly formed nonracial South African Meat Workers Union under the by-line “Contact Special Correspondent.” On the cover of the magazine, Duncan placed the Citizen group slogan “Forward to a South African patriotism based on non-racial democracy”--the first prominent demand for a nonracial answer to apartheid.