This room begins with authored political and documentary writing from South Africa: books in which testimony, journalism, law, travel, public argument, and literary craft meet. Its first work is Sol T. Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa, written in English against the 1913 Natives' Land Act and rooted in both organized Black South African politics and Plaatje's Barolong, Setswana-speaking intellectual world.

The room is not a container for all South African writing. South Africa contains many languages, peoples, genres, and historical positions, none of which can stand for the others. It is also distinct from the neighboring Southern African Traditions room, whose present holdings are chiefly folklore, oral-literary, religious, and colonial collection records.

Begin with the Introduction, then use the Reader's Guide to choose a route through Plaatje's chapters and documentary layers.