At the beginning of Fine Lines from the Box, a 2007 collection of essays and journalism, Njabulo Ndebele describes discovering a crate of books in his father’s garage when he was a boy, at some point in the mid-1960s. It is disguised by unused floor tiles and garden tools; on top are old copies of Huisgenoot, Zonk and Drum magazines, then Ludo and Snakes and Ladders game boards. ‘But as I got closer to the bottom of the box, my heart leapt with disbelief ‘:

Here was, in other words, a secret archive of non-fiction from southern Africa and beyond, one that marked, he writes, ‘a turning point in my life’ (9). Ndebele describes the thrill of devouring the autobiographies of Bloke Modisane and Es’kia Mphahlele as two very different approaches to the same overriding social and political reality: ‘It struck me then that oppressed people were far more complex than the collective suffering that sought to reduce them to a single state of pain’ (10). This was the beginning of ‘a reading and writing journey that has not ended’, a process of seeking to understand his native land, and to represent it in prose with an immediacy and directness that he calls ‘the art of the fine line’: ‘Writing is the one art that compels the writer to explore and express complex feelings and thoughts through an attempt at simplicity and concreteness that are yet able to preserve the complexity’ (10).

Life writing in South Africa often returns to this scene of encounter. If one unpacks that half-hidden crate, similar moments can be found nested (like Russian dolls) within the books Ndebele mentions.