This book is a compilation of columns written by Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu for the Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London in 1977. It is a significant slice of history and a project against the erasure and flattening of Black women’s identities. Noni’s writerly identity – one of many she had – is remarkable, considering the way women were often presented in public discourse during her lifetime.

Society’s need to see women through narrow, confining lenses and roles as mothers, wives and carers/nurturers has been shifting over the decades as women have been adamant in claiming and owning their wholesome and complex selves. Noni’s books, Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts (1960) and The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life (1963), were published by John Murray in London and St Martin’s Press in New York. An Italian translation of Drawn in Colour came out in 1962 in Italy. Noni was a memoirist of the 1960s, becoming the first Black South African woman to publish memoirs. She also became the first Black person, the first woman and the first person born outside Britain to edit The New Strand, a literary magazine. She edited five issues at the magazine’s London office from December 1961 to April 1962, at which point she moved to Jamaica. The Daily Dispatch columns are the first of her writings that were published in South Africa, making her work readily available to the South African reader. The Ochre People was later reissued in 1982 by South African publisher Ravan Press.