摘要：When I was a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) during the late 1970s, De Jong’s Bookshop, easily accessible across Jan Smuts Avenue, became one of the clandestine centres that sold banned books in Johannesburg. ‘A new consignment is in’ was the rallying cry for the Left who immediately descended on the bookshop to obtain their purchases – handed over in brown paper bags. Real & Imagined Readers sketches this period most evocatively: it was a time of rampant censorship, book bannings and book burnings. But it was also the era of critical student newspapers, alternative publishers and of student and activist resistance to apartheid. For readers of my vintage, Matsha’s story was not an imagined experience. For us it was real.
