For nearly a decade Nontsizi Mgqwetho contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu, the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in isiXhosa. Apart from what is revealed in these writings, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman’s poetry on 23 October 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from. Nothing more is heard from her, but the poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in isiXhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. The Nation’s Bounty contains the original poems alongside English translations by Jeff Opland. It was the first of a number of new titles planned for release in the African Treasury Series, a premier collection of texts by South Africa’s pioneers of African literature and written in indigenous languages. First published by Wits University Press in the 1940s, the series provided a voice for the voiceless and celebrated African culture, history and heritage. It continues to make a contribution by supporting current efforts to empower and develop the status of African languages in South Africa.

In the preface to her autobiography Phyllis Ntantala tells us that "Like Trotsky, I did not leave home without the proverbial one-and-six in my pocket. I came from a family of landed gentry in the Transkei". This is what makes her vivid and spirited story so special. Born in the 1920s, Phyllis Ntantala lived her early life in a world of relative privelege. After school at Healdtown and Lovedale, she attended the University of Fort Hare - all premier educational institutions for Africans - where she met her future husband, A.C. Jordan. Her gripping story is not of a struggle to escape from poverty and obscurity but of a creative and articulate black woman's search for identity and fulfilment. Of original interest is the fact that her world cut across apartheid. In the early 1960s, as the apartheid net tightened in South Africa, the Jordans decided to emigrate to the United States. But this did nor prove to be the escape to a land of freedom and opportunity, and the racial discrimination suffered in the USA was, sadly, only too familiar to the Jordans. Ntantala describes evocatively and with searing honesty her life of rich expereince as the wife and mother of famous men - the pioneering scholar, A.C., and the ANC activist and intellectual, Pallo Jordan. Her politics and her feminism have been grounded in the need to carbe out a space for her own life, her own story.