South Africa has a long, but sparse, tradition of publishing the writing of children and teenagers in English. In Chapter 15 I discussed thirteen collections that were published between 1986 and 2003. In 2006 and 2007 two more books in this genre appeared from established publishers: The Suitcase Stories: Refugee Children Reclaim their Identities (Clacherty 2006), and I am an African: Stories of Young Refugees in South Africa (Bloch and Heese 2007). They differ from their predecessors in two respects: they contain written versions of oral narratives by teenagers and young adults, whereas the earlier books are collections of written scripts, and secondly, their subject matter, which is the experiences of young refugees, is new.

One earlier transcription of oral testimony by a young person, translated into English, had been published before: The Story of Mboma by Mboma Dladla as Told to Kathy Bond and Translated by Her from the Zulu, which was “illustrated by Mboma and his friend Mdidyela” (Dladla 1979). It was the first in a project by Ravan Press called the Msinga Series, which was to be “drawn from the autobiographies of children at the Emdukatshani School” in rural Zululand (Dladla 1979, back cover). This appears to have been a brave attempt to make the implied readers, white children, aware of the lives of obscure rural black children at the height of apartheid. Jay Heale (1996, 25) records, “This booklet was far ahead of its time and the series did not continue.”

The publishers of The Story of Mboma and the majority of the earlier collections were concerned with social issues. Maintaining this tradition, The Suitcase Stories and I am an African present transcripts of first-hand accounts by young refugees of the events leading up to their arrival in South Africa and their subsequent lives. Refugees were not covered in earlier collections of South African children's writing in English, and in fact the theme is comparatively new in any South African literature, whether for children, young adults, or adults. Years ago, the South African novelist, Jack Bennett (1981), who achieved his best known successes after moving to Australia, wrote The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon, about Vietnamese boat people who fled to Australia, which became a world bestseller for children – it was made prescribed reading in Spanish schools.