These five plays by one of South Africa’s foremost black playwrights were written between 1979 and 1986, a period in the country’s history marked by intense repression and escalating violence. Several of Maponya's works fell foul of the censorship system. The works included in this collection - ‘The Hungry Earth’, ‘Dirty Work’, ‘Gangsters’, ‘Umongikazi/The Nurse’ and ‘Jika’ – look at topics such as the lives of miners, apartheid in hospitals, and the workings of the security apartheid stat...