Lauretta Ngcobo, who has died aged 84, was a distinguished South African writer and activist. Her novels placed ordinary rural women at the centre of the struggle against apartheid, while her essays and anthologies gave voice to black women in both Britain and South Africa.
And They Didn’t Die (1991) is regarded as her major achievement. This novel places a rural woman, Jezile Majola, as the central narrator and chief consciousness. Set in 1950s South Africa, it portrays 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. The women also have to deal with traditional Zulu customs that perpetuate the status of women as minors – and Ngcobo does not sentimentalise the consequences for women who maintain a firm grip on what little power they can obtain, for example mothers-in-law who seek to represent their absent sons. The novel ends with the repercussions of her killing a white soldier who has attempted to rape her daughter.
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