Lauretta Ngcobo’s biography, fact, career, awards, net worth and life story

Lauretta Ngcobo (13 September 1931 – 3 November 2015) was a South African novelist and essayist. After being in exile between 1963 and 1994 — in Swaziland, then Zambia and finally England, where she taught for 25 years — she returned to South Africa and lived in Durban. Her 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 (1990), 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.”

Early years

The daughter of teachers Rosa (née Cele) and Simon Gwina, Lauretta Gladys Nozizwe Duyu Gwina was born in Ixopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and grew up there. She attended Inanda Seminary School, near Durban, going on to become the first woman from her area to study at the University of Fort Hare. She taught for two years, then took a job with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. In 1956 she was a participant in the women’s anti-pass march.

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.

Exile, 1963–94

In 1963, facing imminent arrest, she fled the country with her two young children, moving to Swaziland, then Zambia and finally England, where she taught at primary school level for 25 years. She was eventually appointed deputy head and then acting head of Lark Hall Infant School in Lambeth, south London, 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.

She also found time to write two novels, Cross of Gold (1981) and And They Didn’t Die (1990), which latter has been described as “path-breaking in its portrayal of the experiences of a black woman that gives its main character, Jezile, an interiority and a voice rarely seen in South African literature before this novel’s publication. It is singular in highlighting the damaging, overlapping effects of apartheid and customary law on the lives of African women confined to apartheid Bantustans.” In addition 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.

In South Africa she again taught for a while before becoming a Member of the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature, where she spent 11 years before retiring in 2008. She published many academic articles, attended many writers’ conferences, and delivered papers at various universities.

She died in hospital in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 3 November 2015, following a stroke. The Sunday Times of South Africa obituary described her as a “writer and activist who gave vulnerable women a voice”, 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 for her work in literature and in promoting gender equality. 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.

Selected works

Novels

• Cross of Gold, novel (Prentice Hall, 1981, ISBN 978-0582785199)
• And They Didn’t Die, novel (London: Virago Press, 1990, ISBN 978-1853811531)

As editor

• Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women Writers in Britain (Pluto Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0745302546; new edn Virago, 1988, ISBN 978-0860686330)
• Prodigal Daughters — Stories of South African Women in Exile (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1869142346)

For children

• Fikile Learns to Like Other People (1994)