And she didn't die: An interview with Lauretta Ngcobo in Johannesburg, 18 August 2010

Abstract

abstractLauretta Ngcobo is a political figure whose engagement with the anti-apartheid struggle predates the birth of the Pan-African Congress, of which she is a founding member, and her subsequent political exile in the early 1960s. Her literary works – Cross of Gold (1981), And They Didn't Die (1990) – can be read as fictionalised histories of the anti-pass campaign of the 1950s and 1960s and its aftermath. Ngcobo's particular sensitivity to the socio-political and cultural forces shaping the life experiences of Black women and their writing in apartheid South Africa is illustrated by essays such as African Motherhood – Myth and Reality (1988), penned in exile. Her latest offering, Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (2012), stems from a deep awareness of the silencing of women's voices within the post-apartheid liberation narrative. My introduction to the short interview that I conducted with the author at the Miriam Tlali Book Club (Johannesburg, 18 August 2010), shows that Ngcobo herself is not immune to the patriarchal representations that marginalise the voices of female anti-apartheid activists. I propose that studying the reception of her work requires an examination of domesticating labels such as ‘struggle wife’ alongside literary descriptors such ‘exile writer’, ‘struggle writer’ or ‘feminist writer’.