Nontsizi Mgqwetho lived on the Witwatersrand goldfields in South Africa, but looked back to her rural background in the Cape Colony, and to earlier, happier times when the independent Xhosa chiefdoms were free of white domination. For nearly a decade, from 1920 to 1929, she contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu, the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa.

Apart from what is revealed in these writings, however, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman’s poetry on 23 October 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from.

Rustum Kozain was born, raised and schooled in Paarl, Western Cape and studied English Literature at the University of Cape Town. After ten months on a Fulbright Scholarship in the USA (1994-1995), he returned to UCT where he eventually lectured and taught in the Department of English until 2004.