Collections of writing by children are strange publications. The young people who wrote the contents have little part in the selection, editing, and appearance of the final publication, and the audience for whom they wrote or drew is often not the same as the final readership of the collection. In fact, the intended final readership is often by no means clear. The whole enterprise is organised by adults, who put together a package which represents childhood in a particular way, to suit their particular purpose.

Collections of writing by children and teenagers in English have been published in South Africa since at least 1919, when Collegiate Girls’ High School in Port Elizabeth produced The Blue and White Story Book. Another early collection, Our Young Writers, was compiled in 1943 from the juvenile pages of three newspapers by two 16-year-old boys, F. de Freitas and L. Hodes, and published by an established Cape Town publisher, Unie-Volkspers. The dedication reads, “The Youth of South Africa dedicates this book to their gallant elders on active service.” It was sold in aid of war funds, and featured, among others, patriotic pieces about the Second World War, in which South African forces were fighting with the Allies at the time. This foreshadowed several recent collections in having a declared theme, and its agenda of national unity and patriotism resonates in the post-apartheid Letters to Madiba (C. Smuts 2002), which I discuss later.

The publications originate in various ways. Magazines have been published which were dedicated exclusively or in part to children's writing; state and semi-state organisations, institutions such as schools and libraries, non-governmental organisations and commercial publishers have published once-off collections; and the South African Council for English Education has been publishing an annual, English Alive, since 1967. Publications of this sort are ephemeral, but I have assembled thirteen published between 1986 and 2003. I have not included a collection of young writing in Xhosa and Zulu called Imibono Yethu (Finlayson 2003), which is billed on an advertising poster as “for all you young people out there”, since I limit the discussion to texts primarily in English.