On September 28, 1933, Noni Jabavu was born in Middledrift, in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa, into a family of Xhosa intellectuals. Her grandfather was John Tengo Jabavu, one of the first Black journalists and newspaper editors in South Africa. Her father Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was a professor, author, and the first Black graduate of the University of London. She was educated in Britain, where she became the first Black African woman to publish a memoir in English.

Her memoir, Drawn in Colour (1960), was followed by The Ochre People (1963). Both documented Xhosa culture, family life, and the daily experience of apartheid from inside African social life — not as ethnographic subject, but as participant and intellectual. They were reviewed in Britain with the polite condescension reserved for non-Western writers producing work about their own communities.

A different case from the same region: Phyllis Ntantala, born in 1920, was a South African teacher, activist, and writer whose 1992 memoir A Life's Mosaic documented the dismantling of Black education under apartheid. She had been working as an educator and writing since the 1950s. Her work circulated in political exile networks in the United States and was largely unknown in mainstream literary culture until decades later.

The intellectual tradition of Black South African women writers — Jabavu, Ntantala, Bessie Head, Miriam Tlali, Gcina Mhlophe — has been excavated primarily by postcolonial literary scholars beginning in the 1990s. The mainstream canon did not do this work.