As long as workers turn up on time, most employers prefer not to know what life is like in the places they live, and which they are only vaguely aware of while driving past on highways like the N2. Langa, Nyanga, Philippi, Mitchells Plain and Gugulethu are but a few of Cape Town's many sprawling townships. These are the places Ingrid Jonker mentions in her haunting poem ‘The Child is Not Dead’, which Nelson Mandela read in his opening address to parliament as the first president of a democratic South Africa in 1994. In spite of ambitious post-apartheid plans to improve housing, the old townships and the many informal settlements which have sprung up around cities remain overcrowded and alarmingly poor. Though unemployment is high, poor rural people are still drawn to these peripheral settlements in search of a better life.

Many township names are an indelible reminder of the worst of South Africa's apartheid past. In Sharpeville, 69 anti-pass protesters were shot dead by police on 21 March 1960, and in Soweto many school children were shot in the June 1976 uprising. Cato Manor (1960), Crossroads (1985) and Boipatong (1992) were all township tragedies. More recently, in Marikana, factors such as poor housing and bad living conditions led to the mine-workers strike and the ensuing massacre on 16 August 2012. To this day, gang violence, murder, rape, and lack of services make township life extremely dangerous.

Several novelists have engaged with the political events of the day, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Time and again, the pivotal characters are domestic workers – probably because authors hardly knew other black people well enough to write about them, and possibly because they believed readers would more readily identify with the plight of such a character than with a bomb-throwing freedom fighter. As mentioned in chapter 3, Elsa Joubert's Poppie Nongena (1978) is based solely on information gained from oral interviews with her domestic worker. After reading about Poppie, no white South African could plead ignorance about the effects of the Group Areas Act, the pass laws, or the homelands policy.