Lauretta Ngcobo

Lauretta Ngcobo (13 September 1931 – 3 November 2015) 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, 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." She taught for two years, then took a job with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria.

In 1957, she married Abednego Bhekabantu Ngcobo, a founder and member of the executive of the Pan Africanist Congress, who in 1961 was sentenced to two years' imprisonment under the Suppression of Communism Act. where she was the only black staff member. In 1984, she became president of ATCAL (the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures), a campaigning group of teachers and writers promoting a more diverse curriculum in the British educational system. In 2018, Annie Gagiano wrote of And They Didn't Die: "The horrors of this time have still not been erased, but a novel of this stature bears witness to them, as it does to the astonishing courage and strength of many of apartheid's victims in a way that is adequate to the place, time and people we must never forget, and in whose memory we have to continue to strive for a country in which all lives are cherished and cherishable."

In addition to being a novelist, Ngcobo was the editor of Let It be Told: Essays by Black Women Writers in Britain (Pluto Press, 1987), which included contributions from Amryl Johnson, Maud Sulter, Agnes Sam, Valerie Bloom, Grace Nichols, Marsha Prescod, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe. Ngcobo also wrote a children's book, Fikile Learns to Like Other People (1994), and in 2012 edited an anthology of stories of South African women in exile, entitled Prodigal Daughters, which was chosen as a Book of the Year by Neelika Jayawardane of Africa is a Country.

Return to South Africa Ngcobo returned to South Africa with her family in 1994, following the election in which the African National Congress came to power. Her husband died in 1997. , where she spent 11 years before retiring in 2008.

She died in hospital in Johannesburg, aged 84, on Tuesday, 3 November 2015, following a stroke. while Barbara Boswell of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town wrote: "Lauretta Ngcobo's death has robbed us of a significant literary talent, freedom fighter, and feminist voice."

Awards In 2006, Ngcobo received the Lifetime Achievement Literary Award of the South African Literary Awards.

In 2008, she was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver for her "excellent achievements in the field of literature and through her literary work championing the cause of gender equality in South Africa".

She was named an eThekwini Living Legend in 2012, and in 2014 received an honorary doctorate of Technology in Arts and Design from Durban University of Technology.

Literary scholar Barbara Boswell edited the volume Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom, including analyses of Ngcobo's life, voice and legacy, as well as key texts.

Selected works Novels Cross of Gold, novel (Prentice Hall, 1981, ) And They Didn't Die, novel (London: Virago Press, 1990, ). Extract in Margaret Busby (ed.), Daughters of Africa, 1992, pp. 407–411. As editor Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women Writers in Britain (Pluto Press, 1987, ; new edn Virago, 1988, ) Prodigal Daughters — Stories of South African Women in Exile (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012, ) For children Fikile Learns to Like Other People (1994)