Lauretta Ngcobo

Lauretta Ngcobo was a South African novelist and essayist. After being in exile between 1963 and 1994 – in Swaziland, then Zambia and finally England, where she taught for 25 years – she returned to South Africa and lived in Durban. Ngcobo's writings between the 1960s and early 1990s have been described as offering "significant insights into the experiences of Black women of apartheid's vagaries". As a novelist, she is best known for And They Didn't Die (1990), set in 1950s South Africa and portraying "the particular oppression of women who struggle to survive, work the land and maintain a sense of dignity under the apartheid system while their husbands seek work in the mines and cities."