This seems to be a classic collection, reprinted many times by different publishers after it originally came out in 1968, but I couldn't find out much about the editors: Herbert Shore is described as a "writer and theatre director" who taught inter alia at the University of East Africa and the University of Pennsylvania — he seems to have come into the limelight shortly before his death when it came out that, during the McCarthy era, the university personnel department had been sharing its confidential records with the FBI, who also had a file on Shore's teenage son. Mrs Shore seems to have been an expert on Makonde art.

The fourteen stories in this collection range from hard-hitting modern writing by Drum magazine people (Lewis Nkosi, Ezekiel (later Es'kia) Mphahlele, Richard Rive, William Modisane) to Herman Charles Bosman's famous late story "Funeral Earth" (1950), in which a group of late-19th-century Boers on commando is outwitted morally, psychologically and in low cunning by the inhabitants of a Bantu village. Shore's introduction makes it clear that he doesn't have much time for white liberals like Alan Paton, but there's a Paton story, "A drink in the passage," included in the collection, and it turns out to be a very good one, neatly showing us how the divisions created by the South African system are too deep for either good intentions or the transformative power of art to fix them. Other white writers include Michael Picardie and Alf Wannenburgh and the only woman in the collection, trade-unionist and left-wing activist Phyllis Altman. Alex la Guma and Richard Rive are there to represent the "coloured" community.

All the writing is of a high standard, although some of the stories (like Altman's "The paper writers") are perhaps a bit too much like straight political sermons. The ones that really stand out for me are Lewis Nkosi's "Potgieter's Castle" and Alex La Guma's "A glass of wine". They come at the problem of South Africa from opposite directions: La Guma portrays the most normal scene you could imagine, a man and a woman having a drink together, and then in the last paragraph twists it around so that we can see how totally impossible normal relations of that kind are in the world that apartheid has created; Nkosi takes an extreme situation — a group of black men arrested during a strike are being transported into the country to work in slave-like conditions for a white farmer — and helps us to imagine what it might feel like to be there by very creative use of language: It seemed that the only language which the guards understood was violence; they used violence with an annoying precision, as though the fact of it was the most beautiful thing they had discovered about the ordering of human society. ( )