The neo-slave narrative is a relatively new literary form for black South African writers, especially for those traditionally excluded from circuits of publication by apartheid law. Originating in the United States, the form casts the practice of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved (Rushdy 1999), inviting the reader into a fictive world which not only portrays the horror of slavery, but also reimagines and recasts it through a lens of resistance. In this chapter, I examine how Yvette Christiansë's Unconfessed (2006) and Rayda Jacobs's The Slave Book (1998) – the first neo-slave narratives penned by black South African women – construct slavery at the Cape, in their transitional and post-transitional literature on the subject. While predecessors and contemporary companions to this genre have creatively imagined and explored the slave experience, notably André Brink, Trudie Bloem, Pamela Jooste and Claire Robertson, the novels of Christiansë and Jooste mark a turning point in the production of South African fiction about slavery: the slave experience was, for the first time, creatively imagined by black women who, quite likely, are descended from the enslaved peoples who built much of the infrastructure of early South African society.

Boswell (2016) has argued that contemporary post-transitional black South African women's poetry produces an ethic that seeks to restore both fragmented histories and fractured subjectivities that are the result of colonial and apartheid domination.