Modikwe Dikobe was born in Seabe, in what is today Mpumalanga, in 1913. He worked as a hawker, domestic worker and nightwatchman, and also became a leader in the squatter movements of the 1940s. He wrote poetry and a novel, Marabi Dance. Marabi is a form of South African jazz that developed in the 1920s and 1930s. It may have been named after Marabastad, a multicultural township in Pretoria. The music developed in places like shebeens, and what were called ‘slumyards’ – areas of rented rooms and backyard shacks in the cities which were home to a mixed, but mostly black, working class population.

The novel is set in the slumyards of the 1930s. This gives a picture of black urban life just before Apartheid. While there was already plenty of racial injustice, segregationist laws and pass raids, it shows a brief moment when there were more ways in which black people could live in the city while avoiding government control. The novel is about a young girl who is caught between the traditional lifestyle of her parents, and the urban life of parties, boys and Marabi music. The extract you will find here shows one of the main causes of mass urbanisation: African women moving to the cities looking for their husbands who had gone to work and never returned, or perhaps running away in the hope of greater freedom from male authority than in the countryside. Once in the city, they often made a place for themselves in the informal economy by brewing beer, doing laundry, or the like.