Miriam Tlali is the first black woman to have published a novel in South Africa and the only woman novelist to have emerged from the bla ck townships during the 1970s, the period of protest literature in South Africa. The 1950s were marked by escalating and increasingly violent confrontation between the black population and the National Party government. The period began with the 1952 Defiance Campaign against carrying passes and culminated in the police massacre of Pan-Africanist-led demonstrators (again protesting against pass legislation) in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, in 1960. The state passed ever harsher laws that drove black writers into exile and imprisonment and banned their work. After a period of enforced silence during the 1960s, a new spirit emerged with the 1970s, in particular among the youth. This spirit was marked by an angry rejection of the apparent subservience of the older generation to white domination, and by an...