This is the first collection of feminist critical essays by and about women in South Africa to appear outside of that country. Many of the pieces were written after February 1990, when President de Klerk lifted the ban on black political organizations. The recognition that a just society cannot be achieved without freedom from gender oppression as well as racial oppression informs these essays and has a direct bearing on the creation of a new society in South Africa.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This selection of essays comes from Africa South, a remarkable magazine which, for five years in the early days of South Africa's apartheid, presented a principled but non-partisan opposition to the National Party government's policies and practices. Africa South was unique in coupling its reportage of South Africa with attention to the rest of Africa, at a time when many colonies were attaining independence from colonial rule.

The essays speak to contemporary readers interested in issues beyond nationalism (transnationalism and globalization), and to those interested in the historical trade and other networks which crossed both the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, holding Africa at their center. The essays' strongest common focus is on people. As individuals and in groups, people's lives are central to all analyses of political, economic, and legal developments.

Ronald Segal, the prescient founder-editor of Africa South, attracted as his contributors men and women who could write with clarity and potent, youthful intensity. Most of these writers would, later in their careers, become famous in their own right.

Some of the contributors in this collection include: Basil Davidson, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ruth First, Lionel Forman, Helen Joseph, Nelson Mandela, Z.K. Matthews, Fatima Meer, Phyllis Ntantala, Alan Paton, and Walter Sisulu.

This important book brings together the previously unpublished letters of three women, Lilian Ngoyi, Bessie Head and Dora Taylor. While Ngoyi, Head and the lesser-known Taylor each made vital and perhaps under-appreciated contributions to the southern African struggle, these letters record their ordinary, domestic lives as well as touching on the socio-political struggles which they conducted from within their homes.

Bessie Head was a writer of novels, short stories and social history, and towards the end of her life was celebrated internationally. Dora Taylor, a white woman who was an early member of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), was also a writer, but her longer work, was not published until after her death and she is still not a widely known public figure. Lilian Ngoyi was an ANC leader and one of the organisers of the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and she was repeatedly arrested for her involvement in trade union and political matters.

Each woman writes to one trusted friend or relative. Ngoyi, Head and Taylor did not know each other but are linked by their political sympathies, their comparable vocations and practices, and by the fact that each had to endure her own version of exile as a result of her activities. These letters record all three writers’ joys and sorrows as they struggled to live principled lives in adversity. As well as giving access to the thoughts of three remarkable women letter-writers, this timely book presents letters as literary artefacts, not just sources of information and opinion. It invites readers to taste the intriguing and sometimes disturbing pleasures of reading personal letters.