The Politics and New Humanism of André Brink constitutes Isidore Diala's appraisal of the oeuvre of André Brink, and a significant contribution to the literature of protest in South Africa. Emerging from a Calvinist Afrikaner background, with his father as a magistrate and his mother a teacher, Brink obtained early exposure to Afrikaner values and the support of the Apartheid policy. His background exposed him to blacks who were largely domestic servants and menial workers in the South African environment.

However, Diala notes that between 1959 and 1961 when Brink undertook a postgraduate programme in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, University of Paris, he confronted profound and dynamic experiences and values about life, race, socialism, etc. He explains that during that period, Brink had opportunities to meet with black intellectuals who he dealt with as equals. He was in France when the Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960. That incident was a result of protests by about 5,000 to 7,000 people against the Pass laws in the South African town of Sharpeville, Transvaal, on whom the police opened fire, leaving 69 people dead, and about 180 wounded. From Diala's account, these two events in Brink's life introduced to Brink deep insights and configured his psyche such that, though he is Afrikaans, he easily relates to the sentiments of the deprived and traumatized black people in South Africa.

Diala avers that consequent upon Brink's exposure to the racial realities in France during his postgraduate studies, Brink began to question Apartheid and the veracity of its twin values of religion and language. His dissatisfaction with European ideals as expressed in South Africa compelled him to repudiate Christianity and become an atheist. His atheistic orientation is prevalent in his writings, which are classified into five sets. The central notion of Brink's writings is the retrieval of global humanistic values. His human-centred orientation finds relevance in his existentialist thought which portrays an individual in a precarious world, saddled with diverse consistent vicissitudes that are beyond his/her control. This is captured in his depiction of Camus’ mythical character, Sisyphus, and the Fanonian ‘wretched of the earth’.