Black South African women's literary production should be understood within the wider political context which, in the period reviewed in this book, was dominated by apartheid. Though colonial South Africa was always racially segregated and marked, as with other colonial societies, by the exploitation of colonised bodies and the decimation of indigenous cultures and history, apartheid ideology became legally entrenched when the white Afrikaner National Party ascended to power in 1948. This chapter surveys South Africa's history during the twentieth century in relation to black women's literary production, focusing on the ways in which the apartheid doctrine and its policy of racial segregation affected black women's lives, both politically and as producers of writing. This history is structured in three broad sections: the segregation era, before formal apartheid (1910–1948); the apartheid era (1948–1990); and the post-apartheid era. For each historical period, I survey the laws and conditions that structured black South Africans’ lives; document women's resistance to forms of injustice and oppression; and survey the types of literatures black women produced as a result of, and in reaction to, the prevailing political conditions.

While male critics and writers such as James Matthews, Njabulo Ndebele, Michael Chapman and Richard Rive, among others, have created taxonomies of black literary output during apartheid – the Drum School of writing of the 1950s, the protest literature of the late 1950s and 1960s, and Black Consciousness writing of the 1970s and 1980s, others have taken issue with the reductive nature of the concept of ‘protest literature’. Writing in 1991, at the beginning of the transition to democracy, Mbulelo Mzamane asserted the following: