This volume brings together Siphiwo Mahala's two plays: The House of Truth, based on the life and writings of Can Themba, and Bloke and His American Bantu, dramatising the friendship between Bloke Modisane and Langston Hughes. On their own merits, these plays make important original contributions to South Africa's dramatic heritage. But they also work within a longer literary tradition and help ensure that earlier generations of South African writing will, in the words of Mahala's character Can, ‘never be erased from the face of history’.

By the end of the twentieth century, it felt as though erasure was a real danger and black South African literary history might lapse into oblivion. Over the previous several decades, the urgency of an ever-escalating struggle against an ever more oppressive apartheid system had made previous generations’ struggles quickly appear quaint and outmoded. Strict censorship by the white minority state had made it hard to obtain many important works of South African literature and made it a struggle for small presses to continue publishing. Then, after legislated apartheid ended in 1994, many writers, readers and audiences lost their appetite for the literature of struggle and resistance, which dominated black South African writing throughout the apartheid era.

For all these reasons, there was a moment at the turn of the millennium when the long, rich history of black writing in South Africa threatened to go out of print and disappear from public memory. Fortunately, it was kept limping along by the efforts of a few scattered academics and by anthologies such as Michael Chapman's The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s, published in 1989, which brought together some of the most important stories published in the Johannesburg-based Drum magazine in its heyday. These stories blurred the lines between fiction, reportage and sociology, and they gave ample evidence of the vibrancy and innovation of black South African writing in the middle of the twentieth century.

The stories published in Drum documented, for example, the dangerous romance of life in Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town, even as those black and mixed-race areas were being declared whites-only neighbourhoods and subjected to forced removals and demolition.