Zoë Wicomb’s passing, on October 13 at the age of 76, has prompted an outpouring of tributes from black women writers and scholars across the globe, a reflection of the immense political and literary impact of her work. Figures like Pumla Gqola and Gabeba Baderoon have highlighted her fearless critique of colonial and racial mythologies, her insistence on complexity, and her refusal to be co-opted by easy solidarities. These tributes speak to Wicomb’s lifelong commitment to unraveling the social fictions that continue to shape South African life: fictions of race, gender, belonging, memory, and power. As a writer, critic, and teacher, she challenged her readers not with loud declarations, but with careful, unsettling questions.

Her 1992 reading of Bessie Head’s Maru is an early marker of this political vision, as is her seminal 1998 essay on shame in the South African literary imagination. There, Wicomb showed how the category “colouredness” had been shaped by a history of symbolic associations—tainted bloodlines, racial impurity, miscegenation—and how these myths, far from being neutral descriptors, continued to saturate post-apartheid discourse. Yet her analysis was often misread. Some critics mistook her deconstruction of these colonial fictions as a tacit endorsement of them, folding her into the very discursive lineage—figures like Olive Schreiner or Sarah Gertrude Millin—that she so precisely challenged. This kind of misreading was not unfamiliar to Wicomb. In fact, her work bears a certain affinity with that of J.M. Coetzee: both writers have at times been accused of “naturalizing” racial discourses when, in fact, they were intimately deconstructing them.

Another important way in which Wicomb contributed to South African political debate is through her sustained engagement with the figure of Sara Baartman. Baartman—an elusive but recurring presence in her novel David’s Story—looms large across Wicomb’s oeuvre as an index of historical memory. Yet unlike many South African, North American, and Black diasporic poets, playwrights, and novelists who have sought to convey definitive “truths” about Baartman, Wicomb turns her gaze instead to the politics of re-membering itself. What demands interrogation, she insists, is not Baartman’s historical “truth,” but the ways she is made to serve the symbolic needs of the present—the ways she is repeatedly projected upon, claimed, and conscripted to suit others’ purposes.

This point is made forcefully in her interview in the 2021 collection Surfacing, where she critiques certain currents of “woke” politics, particularly those associated with what she calls “bright young things.” In their eagerness to “speak truth to power,” Wicomb suggests, these voices can end up hardening complex truths, collapsing the contradictions of the past into performances of moral clarity that often reflect the psycho-political needs of the present more than the realities of history.

It is, in fact, deeply ironic for us to acknowledge—as we write this piece—that we, too, are implicated in this dynamic. Already, there are those who seek to claim and contain “Zoe” as a fully knowable figure (in the same way that many have already claimed, owned, and distorted Sara Baartman), ready to be remembered and reified. In this respect, our act of tribute risks echoing the very gestures Wicomb so often questioned the drive to fix, possess, and project an authoritative version of a life that resists such closure.

The political commitments described above were essential to Wicomb’s writing, her teaching, and her public commentary. All were shaped by the Black Consciousness politics that also nourished the vision of her contemporary, Jakes Gerwel, the celebrated rector of the University of the Western Cape, her alma mater, and the university at which she taught for many years. Wicomb boldly and consistently defended the strategic essentialism of “Biko blackness” in the mid-1990s, at a time when coloured separatism (and ethnic consciousness more generally) had begun to surface with virulent force. She challenged students at UWC, UCT, and Stellenbosch, as well as the broader public, condemning forms of identity politics that produced new essentialisms, exclusions, and at times, outright xenophobia. Like another of her contemporaries, Njabulo Ndebele, she stressed how these patterns found their origins in the very colonial and racist biopolitics they claimed to oppose.

Still, the scope of Wicomb’s vision, despite its deep-rootedness in South Africa and the local, was also astoundingly broad. Some may wonder why she focused so insistently on South Africa while living in Glasgow, Scotland, when a global and transhistorical perspective—so evident in her latest novel Still Life—was always available to her. But like Bessie Head, a South African writer she deeply admired, Wicomb chose to ground her expansive, universalist vision in the particulars of place: a view of the local that was at once compassionate and sharply critical. And like Head, Wicomb’s universality was never of the abstract, liberal-humanist kind; it was transhistorical and embedded, political and aesthetic at once. Still Life and October are both testaments to this. So too is the eclecticism of her critical writing, where canonical thinkers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and JM Coetzee appear alongside marginalized knowledge-makers—lesser-known Black South African women writers, or “dated” critics like Lewis Nkosi—without hierarchy or defensiveness.

Wicomb’s “local” was a South Africa she knew intimately—at least in the 1990s and early 2000s—and which she wrote about with respect, love, and also with a passionate outrage at the injustices that endured. Her local was also the realm of sharp social commentary: she wrote about colorism among those classified as African and Coloured, about the anxieties of Black women around hair texture in a world still governed by white-centric beauty standards. And her writing was lyrical too, often poetic: evoking the striking landscapes and flora of Namaqualand, where she was born (as in October), or capturing the speech patterns and idioms of people of color from the Northern Cape and the streets and mountains of the Western Cape.

For us, she’s been a wonderful friend: inspiring, hilariously funny, outrageously adventurous, and incredibly generous. But she’s also been a pioneering South African writer of novels, social commentary, and literary and cultural criticism. A great loss to many is that she did not live long enough to write even more.

As spring returns and the Namaqualand flowers bloom—just as they do in October, the novel that bears the season’s name—we are reminded of her deep feeling for place and its quiet rebellions. In that novel, one of Wicomb’s more complex, though minor, characters, Sylvie, reflects on the patch of land she has shaped into her own:

Here…where she has planted the vygie…she has always known is for her, Sylvie, and her alone. That is why she turned the patch into a garden, arranged the stones…In the veld she dug up kanniedood and koekemakranka, and planted them around to show up the glorious purple. … If, as AntieMa says, the devil has blown in her blood, then that blood is the screaming purple here at her feet…

It is hard not to read this as a kind of quiet credo, one that speaks to Wicomb’s sensibility as a writer who tended her literary and political garden with fierce attention, irony, and love. The screaming purple at our feet is hers, too.