Dreyer 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 (not to be confused with the pro-apartheid tabloid of the same name launched in 1976), which introduced the concept of nonracial democracy in South Africa.
On February 8, 1958, Patrick Duncan launched the Liberal Party fortnightly Contact, with offices on Parliament Street in Cape Town.
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.
Their great-granddaughter Catharina Maasdorp (1757–86) later married the frontiersman Daniel Ferdinand Immelman (1756–1800), the guide of the Swedish naturalists Carl Peter Thunberg and Anders Sparrman (Linnaeus's star pupils) in the Cape Interior in the late eighteenth century.
Thousands of people living in southern Africa today are descended from Isacq d’Algué, who arrived at the Cape in 1713 as an adelbors, or midshipman, on a Dutch East India Company ship.
Dreyer's novel A Beast in View (1969), which was banned by the apartheid government of South Africa immediately on publication, was undoubtedly the first work of fiction ever to deal with the controversial subject of fracking.
This was not just science fiction: the idea was based on an actual proposal by the Continental Oil Company to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, "Project Dragon Trail: The Stimulation of a Natural Gas Reservoir by a Contained Nuclear Explosion," which envisioned setting off a 40-kiloton device in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, with the assistance of the CER Geonuclear Corporation (three 33-kiloton nuclear devices were eventually detonated as a test in 1973 under the rubric Project Rio Blanco).
[2] In Dreyer's novel, this apocalyptic plan is foiled by guerrillas sent in by an internationally based "League of South African Democrats" (there is no mention in the book of the ANC).
Johannes Augustinus Dreyer arrived in South Africa on 8 Nov 1713, on board the Dutch East India Company ship the Nesserak on a voyage from Texel in the Netherlands to Batavia under the nom de plume Isacq d’Algué.
Born in the small town of Grube, close to Lübeck, in [what is now] the northern German province of Schleswig-Holstein to the local Lutheran pastor and his wife, and studying at the University of Rostock by 1708, it remains one of the enduring questions of the Dreyer family history how and why he came to land up in the Cape under a different name, five years on.
In the novel the author uses these basic facts to weave a rich and colourful story of adventure, human folly, comedy and tragedy around this intriguing figure.
A very impressive amount of research and astute interpretation has also gone into recreating the early 18th century historical and philosophical milieu within which Isacq’s story unfolds.