During the years of apartheid in South Africa and British colonial rule in neighbouring countries, black writers produced little autobiographical writing about their childhoods under those regimes, especially for young readers. Beginning in the 1970s, South African English white writers (whose readers were almost entirely white) wrote young adult fiction that showed white teenagers coming to understand the evils of apartheid, while books for younger children that were about black people portrayed the harshness of the conditions under which they lived. What little children's literature from neighbouring colonies reached wider circulation, even after they acquired independence, consisted of the retelling of African folktales, almost all by white writers, and many similar books of folktales were published in South Africa. Publishing so many books in this genre showed respect for African culture but at the same time gave a picture of African people as living an ancient, tribal life untouched by modernity (Tötemeyer 1989).

To compensate for the lack of youth books by black writers about the childhood of black people under apartheid, two key memoirs that were written for adults by famous black authors, Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel (later Es’kia) Mphahlele (1959) and Tell Freedom by Peter Abrahams (1954), were reissued in versions for young readers, but more recent adult fiction and non-fiction of this kind remained on shelves for adults.

Since the South African government unbanned opposition organisations and released Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, a good many white writers for adults have written autobiography, semi-fiction and fiction that explores white childhoods under apartheid, while a few other white writers have written about their childhoods in colonial Kenya, Zimbabwe and Swaziland. Gradually, black writers are adding books about the black experience in those times. Among this profusion of recent books are some that have been written specifically for young readers and some that public reception has endorsed as “young adult” (YA). In this chapter I refer to some young adult novels of these kinds that have won literary awards.

One of the first notable YA novels by a black writer appeared in 1991. It was 92 Queen's Road, a semi-autobiographical novel for children written in the third person, about growing up in the 1950s. The author was Dianne Case, a member of the so-called coloured community of Cape Town.