In 1983, at the height of apartheid police brutalities, Ingrid de Kok published “Small Passing,” a poem dedicated to “a woman whose baby died stillborn, and who was told by a man to stop mourning, ‘because the trials and horrors suffered daily by black women in this country are more significant than the loss of one white child.’” The poem draws attention to the dignity of every individual who has experienced private suffering outside the context of national tragedy. No type of suffering is so intense that it can replace another. Thus, a woman who has lost her child at its birth deserves as much attention as do the parents of the children massacred by the apartheid security forces. To be sure, the contexts of these experiences are quite different; one is natural, while the other is gratuitous. We should nevertheless pay attention to each with the goal of relieving the pain of those who suffer. The failure to consider individual contexts easily leads to ideological responses, which notoriously prescribe solutions that ironically ignore individual experiences such as pain or pleasure. Solidarity expresses itself in one person's resolve to end another person's pain; solidarity is always born of an individual's relation to other individuals, regardless of their backgrounds. “Small Passing” is emblematic of de Kok's mythopoeia, which is constructed around instances of people's pain.

De Kok's poetics have profound similarities with the poetry of Antjie Krog, who became one of Africa's leading public intellectuals thanks in part to Country of My Skull, her celebrated report on the works of the TRC. Krog and de Kok can be read within the tradition of the Sestigers—or Sixtyers—a group of South African writers of Afrikaner ancestry who stood up against the inhumanities of apartheid, “reacting against the National Party's increasingly authoritarian policies.”

The group's poets included Breyten Breytenbach, André Brink, Adam Small, Bartho Smit, and Ingrid Jonker. The philosophy of the Sestigers is best understood in the words of André Brink, who wrote in the November 1968 issue of the Sestiger magazine Kol: “If I speak of my people then I mean: every person black, coloured [mixed race] and white, who shares my country and my loyalty towards my country.