Amandla: A novel

by Miriam Tlali

Genres: South Africa

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Miriam Tlali (born 11 November 1933) is a South African novelist. She was the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, in 1979. She was also one of the first to write about Soweto.

Miriam Masoli Tlali was born in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, and attended St Cyprian's Anglican School and then Madibane High School. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand until it was closed to Blacks during the apartheid era; she later went to the University of Roma, Lesotho. She left there because of lack of funds, and became an office clerk.

Tlali's first book, Muriel at Metropolitan (1979; originally called Between Two Worlds), is a semi-autobiographical work and its "viewpoint is a new one in South African literature". She later wrote other books, inclusing Amandla (1980), Mihloti (1984), and Footprints in the Quag (1989).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Tumelo Moleleki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some things make the pleasure of reading, even painful stories, that is derived from good writing to be diminished and the interest to keep reading to dwindle. I kept reading for the history lesson more than out of enjoyment once that cuss word was first pronounced, so 2.5 stars then can only be represented with 3.