Ngcobo’s work often deals with the realities of black women facing both political and social oppression. While And They Didn’t Die (1990) is considered to be her masterpiece, her first novel Cross of Gold was published in 1981. Awards and recognition came relatively late in her career.
In a new documentary film And She Didn’t Die, producer and director Kethiwe Ngcobo creates a cinematic tribute that is at once an intimate and politically urgent portrait of her mother Lauretta. But what does it mean for a daughter to film her mother, not as a private act of remembrance but as a contribution to public history?
Structured as a conversation between them, the film moves between personal memory and historical reckoning, asking how lives shaped by political struggle are remembered and who gets to do the remembering.
As a scholar of African literature, I am aware of how few historical films exist about African women writers, and how often their voices are absent from audio and visual archives. And She Didn’t Die matters as a rare and powerful act of preservation.
It is a kind of preservation that is necessary. It points to a broader history in which African women writers, often working under conditions of exile, censorship, or displacement, have been made vulnerable to cultural disappearance.
Returning home
The opening scene allows the viewer to witness the historical return of Lauretta Ngcobo to her birthright. Against looming terrain, she reflects from a moving car, asking in her language, isiZulu: iphi inkaba yakho? – where is your umbilical cord?
The question gestures not only to physical return but to longing, for a place that exists both before her and within her. “I always find myself coming here,” she says. Land is a metaphor for what exile takes away and what memory insists on preserving. Ngcobo’s reflections feel insistently present.
Throughout the film, she speaks directly about exile as the most painful condition of her life:
There was no home. I had no home. That was the highest point of my painful exile, my painful experience as a politician.
Exile, as the film makes clear, is not only geographic displacement but a loss of self. Forced underground by the apartheid regime, Ngcobo lived an itinerant life, but always oriented towards return. Survival became a form of suspension, living for a future that was constantly deferred.
Besides Ngcobo as the main character, the film’s cast also includes her husband, sister, children, grandchildren, a scholar, and close friends, each offering fragments of her and how she moved through the world. In doing so, it participates in a broader reassessment of South Africa’s literary canon that has long privileged male voices.
The film also pays attention to the costs of political commitment, particularly within family life. Ngcobo’s elder daughter Khosi Mabena reflects:
I missed the mum of small things.
The remark captures the emotional complexity of growing up alongside a mother whose responsibilities as a writer and activist often took precedence. The film does not sentimentalise this absence, nor does it frame it as moral failure. Instead, it allows the ambivalence to stand, acknowledging the real losses produced by lives lived in struggle.
At the same time, And She Didn’t Die insists that Ngcobo’s politics were never separable from care. She wrote from an understanding that resistance does not take place only in prisons, parliaments or at public rallies, but also in homes, spaces historically dismissed as domestic or minor, yet central to women’s survival.
Ngcobo practised a form of political motherhood in which care was expanded beyond the private sphere, even as that expansion came at an intimate cost.
Writing as freedom
And She Didn’t Die also responds to cultural loss. Many writers of Ngcobo’s generation, particularly women, remain absent from public memory, despite the promise of accessibility in the digital age. Their voices and images are missing. This film functions as a corrective. We hear Ngcobo speak. We see her age, laugh, remember. The documentary insists on her presence.
South African scholar and writer Barbara Boswell, author of Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom, situates Ngcobo in the film within a longer genealogy:
Her story didn’t start with herself. It started with her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother.
That lineage continues through her daughter Kethiwe, who uses the camera as a storytelling tool, extending a long line of work.
Ngcobo reflects on discovering feminism in exile:
Feminism is what I found in England. I collided with these forces with great joy.
Yet she is also clear-eyed about the limits placed on women within liberation movements:
In the main struggle mine was a cheering role, in support of the men. I had no voice. I could only assent, never contradict, nor offer alternatives. All decision-making positions were and are still in the hands of men.
Writing, then, becomes a form of freedom. As Ngcobo puts it:
My writing arises from the depths I cannot reach.
In literature, she sets the terms: she creates worlds where women speak, decide, and act. As South African scholar Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse notes, Ngcobo was not merely a “struggle wife”. Her marriage to A.B. Ngcobo, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, did not define her life or limit her agency.
Through her writing, she claims autonomy, forging intellectual and emotional spaces that neither exile, political struggle, nor domestic expectation could fully contain.
And She Didn’t Die is ultimately a film about survival of memory, of voice, of lineage. It is a tender and necessary portrait of a woman whose work was never marginal and whose return to public view feels inseparable from the present moment in which South Africa is once again asking what freedom means, and who gets to define it.
The film is not yet available for streaming. It is screening on film festivals around the world
Written by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
