H. I. E. Dhlomo is currently seen as an important black poet and as one of the pioneers of black theater in South Africa with an early play concerning the nineteenth-century Ama-Xhosa cattle killing, The Girl Who Killed to Save (Nongquase the Liberator) (1935). His short stories reflect a deep understanding of black South African customs and offer a challenging black perspective on the politics and psychology of what was, at the time they were written, a white-dominated South Africa.

Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo was born 26 February 1903 near Pietermaritzburg in Natal Province (now KwaZulu-Natal). He studied to be a teacher at the Amamzimtoti Training Institute (later Adams College) from 1922 to 1924. After qualifying he taught for a while, then later turned to librarianship; to journalism, sometimes using the pseudonym "Busy Bee"; and to newspaper editing. For most of his life Dhlomo was involved in creative writing in the genres of...