Current literature from South Africa reflects some of the country’s vast cultural diversity and helps illustrate many of the challenges associated with struggles for equality, against the background of a painful and continuing history fraught with injustices. This article makes an argument for engaging with these literary texts in the secondary EFL classroom and proposes a reading of five contemporary texts featuring young adult protagonists. Taking a combined context-reader approach, it contends that such texts are not only conducive to rich cultural learning, but also to personal development at learners’ particular stages of self-formation. Involving themselves in some of South Africa’s historical, cultural, and moral complexities through literary texts offers adolescent learners a lens through which to view, reflect on, and potentially validate and consolidate some of their own multifaceted, possibly contradictory experiences, as selves-in-progress within their own diverse social contexts, and it provides language with which to do so.