AND SHE DIDN’T DIE
A FILM BY KETHIWE NGCOBO
Synopsis
“My Mother's Legacy: A Documentary”
And She Didn't Die follows a daughter as she chronicles her mother Lauretta Ngcobo's journey from rural South Africa to revolutionary courier to acclaimed feminist writer in exile. This documentary uses family archives, historical footage, dramatic re-enactments, and powerful readings from Lauretta's works to reveal how her dangerous political work, escape from South Africa through Swaziland and Zambia, and her ultimate exile in the UK where she found her voice as a writer, became acts of resistance, preserving personal history while challenging national narratives. The film not only documents her political journey, but it also captures their relationship as mother and daughter. The film has a non-linear narrative structure that mirrors memory's fragmented nature, while preserving Lauretta Ngcobo's voice and legacy for future generations.
Articles
Overcoming the ‘daily bludgeoning by apartheid’: black South African women writers, agency, and space
by Barbara Boswell
This article examines creative agency in the lives of four black South African women writers during South African apartheid: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Gladys Thomas, and Sindiwe Magona. Drawing theoretically on Mamphela Ramphele’s conceptualizations of space, it analyzes life review interviews with these writers, who were among the first black women to publish novels and poetry in apartheid South Africa, about the ways in which they came to understand themselves as writers and creative subjects within a political system that severely curtailed their political and creative expression. It considers agency a key tool for understanding how these authors transcended their received identities as laborers and reproducers of labor for the apartheid nation, to become authors of their own lives and works. In elucidating how writing increased personal agency for these writers, the article posits the concept of creative re-visioning – a subject’s ability to re-envision what is possible for her to achieve beyond received expectations for her life. It theorizes such creative re-visioning as a strategy of resistance during apartheid and an additional dimension to feminist conceptualizations of human agency
Black women write
by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse
In her new biography of South African writer Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell shows how the publishing industry historically excluded Black women, and how they wrote in spite of that.
Lauretta Ngcobo obituary
by Lyn Innes: The Guardian
South African writer and activist whose work explored apartheid and the struggle of black women.
Following the election in 1994 that brought the ANC to power, Lauretta Ngcobo was able to return to her native South Africa, where her previously banned writing could now be read. Photograph: KwaZulu-Natal government website
