Quote by Miriam Tlali: “I was determined that I would write about the people around me.”

This is a declaration of artistic purpose rooted in loyalty. Tlali chose not to write abstract or universal fiction — she chose to write about her own community, their lives under apartheid, their specific humanity. This choice was radical in a literary world that rarely saw Black South African women as subjects worthy of serious fiction.

Muriel at Metropolitan was published in 1975 in South Africa, the year of the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique and the intensification of the liberation struggle in southern Africa. Black South African writers were producing a new literature of witness against apartheid, at great personal and professional risk.

South African novelist who was the first Black South African woman to have a novel published in her home country. Her 1975 novel Muriel at Metropolitan, drawn from her experience working at a white-owned furniture store in Johannesburg, was banned by the apartheid government. She was a founding member of the Staffrider literary movement.