From the same period dates the novel As die Son Ondergaan (When the Sun Goes Down), a story about the demise of a young brown man (Frans) in the city. The gifted young man, unable to realise his ambition to become a teacher, left his home in the countryside for city, hoping to get a paying job. He is swallowed up in the urban industrial machine and makes friends with the wrong crowd of people. His morality undermined by drinking and sex, he marries a flighty young woman, Karolien. Deserted by his so-called friends and his wife, he is given over to drink. Then his parents come for him. By returning to his old, familiar environment he can at last, overcome his spiritual crisis. For the first time in African literature, the race issue is here addressed from the point of view of people of colour, the emotional impact emphasised. This problem, however, remains largely in the background, the destruction and preservation of the protagonist representing not a symbolic example of the coloured people's struggle, but rather a more universally human development. The novel shows a far more nuanced characterization than the stereotyping of so many previous writers.
