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Writers and artists know better than anyone else what it is like to live and talk and shout and scream, knowing that there is no-one there listening. That makes a killing silence. What validates the experience of an artist is knowing that somewhere out there someone will acknowledge and share your deepest thoughts, your joys, your pains and your joys. Yet in South Africa we have lived for a very long time in the stifling isolation of our separate worlds both as individuals and groups. Only now do we as South African writers and artists self-consciously group and reach out to find fellow South African kindred spirits. (Lauretta Ngcobo 1994, 1)

The destructive silencing of apartheid denied expression, development, clarification and sharing of ideas and arguments about identity, location and values. Newly licensed to speak following the collapse of apartheid, many South African women work and write together, participating, for example, in the Like a House on Fire collection (1994), or individually, exploring and newly expressing their own versions of their lives, and their new sense of identity. Identity and location are issues that much of their work has in common, some, returning (either bodily or in their imaginations) to the locations they left. Where once these women were stifled by apartheid's censorship of thought, behaviour and expression, they now feel free to re-imagine and re-possess the locations of their past, reinscribing them with their own interpretations and values (see Farida Karodia, Against an African Sky, 1995). They re-member the shared past and re-vision a new future through a variety of forms, favourite among which are life writing and semi-fictional autobiography (Basali, 1995; Like a House on Fire, 1994 ). Lauretta Ngcobo talks of sisterhood and writing influenced by the `shining beacon' of Olive Schreiner's comments on women's roles and challenges. Like Ngcobo, many South African women are now establishing a sense of a writing history which is vital in the creative pursuit of expressing a new South Africa that will encourage all its members to speak.

Unity across barriers of race and class is a feature of Farida Karodia's short stories, stories in Basali ! and the variety of writing in the COSAW collection, Like a House on Fire (1994).

Redefining an African Sky: South African Women's Writing Post-Apartheid