From the blurb:

"With more than 60 photographs. In this powerful and eloquent book, the superb writings of Nadine Gordimer and the stark, forceful photographs of David Goldblatt are brought together to reveal to us, in the details of individual lives, the great human damage wrought by apartheid. Both born in South Africa, both white, Gordimer and Goldblatt have spent much of their artistic lives exploring the effects of apartheid—not as mere observers but as participants (however unwitting) in a system they abhor. And each has come to believe that "what white South Africans have done to black South Africans seeps like an indelible stain through fiction and photographs. The repression and tragedy of black lives is there; we did not have to look for it, only to let it reveal itself as honestly and as deeply as we could." David Goldblatt's photographs—taken over the last three and a half decades—are of faces caught in despair and hope, defiance and resignation; of impoverished, barren "homelands" and desolate countrysides; of all the pathetic and horrific accoutrements of apartheid, and all the frailty and nobility of the human spirit engaged in a struggle it has not chosen and cannot flee. The photographs are accompanied by excerpts from the large span of Gordimer's novels and stories. Together, these images and words form an emphatic and profoundly moving indictment of apartheid and a powerful evocation of the indomitable urge toward liberation in South Africa."