Effects of colonialism?

Most of the conflict in Mine Boy can be traced to conditions created by settler colonialism in South Africa, which at the time the novel is set was ruled by a white minority descended from white Dutch and British colonists. Laws and de facto segregation efforts disenfranchised black and colored people while concentrating land, wealth, and political power in the hands of whites. The region's colonial legacy is reflected in the white policemen's undue violence against people of color, in the beliefs that Xuma has about not being able to be friends with Paddy, in Eliza's desire not to think of herself as black, in Leah's need to hide her beer-selling business, and in the miserable conditions in which the people of Malay Camp live. While the novel ends with Xuma having had an epiphanic realization that a society without racial divisions could exist, the decades that followed the novel's publication only saw the South African government increase its efforts to segregate people of color from the white minority, ushering in the apartheid—"separateness"—era.