21 ICONS - Miriam Tlali

Miriam Tlali: “A good book by itself, if it has the right messages in it, can change a person; his outlook, his persona, it can change a human being into something he never thought he could be. It can reinvent a person. That’s what a good book can do and it doesn't come through the efforts of other people, it comes from inside you.”

21 ICONS featured the nineteenth icon of its second season: Miriam Tlali, the first black woman in South Africa to publish a novel, Muriel at Metropolitan, a semi-autobiographical work, as well as the author of the critically acclaimed Amandla.

In an intimate conversation with Steirn, Tlali talks about her life as the first black South African female author. Born in Doornfontein in Johannesburg she experienced her childhood in Sophiatown, that legendary community within Johannesburg which was razed because it was the sole area where Africans were permitted to take permanent title to land.