A group of women at a specific period in the history of Southern Africa find their family life under the pressures of capitalist modernity and apartheid.

These ordinary, 'private' stories are anchored to the more powerful public stories of Penelope of ancient Greek mythology, who waited eighteen years while her husband Odysseus was away, and Winnie Mandela who waited for twenty-seven years.

The life story of Winnie Mandela remains one of the great unfolding dramas of our times; a tale of triumphs and tragedies that is only just beginning to be examined.

Njabulo S. Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture initially appeared in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. In 1991, the essays were collected under the current title of Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Here, this collection is reprinted without revision, together with an interview provoked by Albie Sachs paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom. That it is possible to republish the essays without revision so many years after their first appearance is a tribute to Ndebele's prescience. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society.