"While printing these photographs of African writers u dating from the late sixties, through my years in exile and right up to the present u for this publication, I realized that I was retracing a journey that originated in the fishing village of Hout Bay, where I grew up in the fifties. My high school English teacher was Richard Rive, and he brought drama into the classroom. Walking around, constantly clutching a paperback by some renowned writer from Russia, Europe, the States and South Africa, he seemed so cool and with it....This is not a catalogue of writers; rather a shared journey with some and brief encounters with others, but always inspired by the printed word." --George Hallett

This is a stunning collection of more than 100 portraits, in black and white, of writers from Africa and, in particular, South Africa. The chronological arrangement reveals the changing conditions and roles of writers from the 1960s to the present: While the early pictures were mostly taken in exile, there is a distinct shift as writers came back to South Africa in the early nineties.

The most recent photographs were taken after the Pretoria Writers' Conference in 2002, which provided landmark debates around the identity and role of writers currently living in South Africa. A foreword by Keorapetse aeWillie' Kgositsile reflects on the early times, while short texts by some of the more recent writers reflect the diversity of views held by writers living in contemporary South Africa.

"George Hallett" is a Cape Town-based photographer who has exhibited internationally. He returned to South Africa in the early nineties after more than twenty years in exile. In 1980 he won the Hasselblad Award for Outstanding Contributions to Photography in Sweden, and in 1995 he won a Golden Eye in the World Press Photo Award for his essay on President Mandela during the 1994 election campaign.

Keorapetse Kgositsile, South Africa's second poet laureate, was a political activist, teacher, and poet. He lived, wrote, and taught in the United States for a significant part of his life and collaborated with many influential and highly regarded writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Plumpp, Dudley Randall, and George Kent. This comprehensive collection of Kgositsile's new and collected works spans almost fifty years. During his lifetime, Kgositsile dedicated the majority of his poems to people or movements, documenting the struggle against racism, Western imperialism, and racial capitalism, and celebrating human creativity, particularly music, as an inherent and essential aspect of the global liberation struggle. This collection demonstrates the commitment to equality, justice, and egalitarianism fostered by cultural workers within the mass liberation movement. As the introduction notes, Kgositsile had an "undisputed ability to honor the truth in all its complexity, with a musicality that draws on the repository of memory and history, rebuilt through the rhythms and cadences of jazz." Addressing themes of Black solidarity, displacement, and anticolonialism, Kgositsile's prose is fiery, witty, and filled with conviction. This collection showcases a voice that wanted to change the world-and did.

Z Pallo Jordan is the quintessential man of political letters on the one hand, and an astute literary historian in his own inimitable way, penning flowing observations, interspersed with pithy and yet colourful descriptions on the other hand – while cutting to the bone in analyses and breath-taking insights, informed by meticulous reading amassed over nearly half a century of struggle. Letters to Friends and Comrades is the ultimate collection of his piercing and yet embraceable thoughts and inquiries. This treasure trove of the writings of Z Pallo Jordan could not have been more timely in this critical – or should we say unfortunate – period of the promise that was the New Democratic Republic of South Africa, and published as it is on the eve of the African National Congress’s general elective congress in December 2017, and interestingly in the aftermath of the watershed municipal elections of 3 August 2016.