A poignant scene opens Lauretta Ngcobo's debut novel, Cross of Gold (1981). Sindisiwe Zikode, a mother, an anti-apartheid freedom fighter, and a former domestic worker, is on the run from the South African Police. When the reader first encounters her, Sindisiwe is stalking the border between Botswana and South Africa. Exiled in Botswana, Sindisiwe tries to facilitate the safe passage of her young sons from South Africa. The novel's opening pages make palpable the danger the family faces in its bid for freedom from a politically oppressive regime.

Early in the first chapter of the novel, Sindisiwe is shot by police from the South African side of the border. She secures a safe crossing for her sons, but unable to get to a hospital, dies an excruciating death under a searing southern African sky. Sindisiwe is buried in a shallow grave by strangers as her sons try to process the loss of a mother they hardly knew. She has, however, left some sort of legacy, one that her sons discover in a suitcase after her death: a long, lyrical letter, describing the change in her subjectivity from apolitical domestic worker to militant anti-apartheid activist. The letter describes, in great detail, Sindisiwe's transformation into a political subject. Its pages bear witness to the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, which killed 69 peaceful black protestors in a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Determined to frame the political event from her own perspective as a black woman, Sindisiwe makes her standpoint clear in the opening sentences of her letter. ‘Whatever you know, it is not from me you got it’ (Cross of Gold, 20), she writes, providing a rationale for her letter writing.