Since its founding in 1970, the mission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York has been to reclaim the best in writing by and about women. In 1994, staff members traveled to Accra, Ghana, to participate in the early planning of its most ambitious project to date, Women Writing Africa: the publication of five anthologies of African women's written and oral compositions, organized by region, as well as a series of individual books by African women.

With the support of The Ford Foundation, Women Writing Africa will include writing from a continent of more than 50 countries and 400 languages. The first volume in the anthology series will appear in 2002. To date, individual books in the Women Writing Africa series You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town by Zoë Wicomb; Changes and No Sweetness Here by Ama Ata Aidoo; and And They Didn't Die by Lauretta Ngcobo.

According to Florence Howe, the project's codirector and publisher director/emerita, "Women Writing Africa is a project that aims to restore, present and preserve African women's voices." Howe -- along with codirectors Tuzyline Jita Allan and Abena P.A. Busia, both African literature scholars travels regularly to Africa to meet with groups of scholars who are, piece by piece, researching and collecting the literary history of African women.

David's Story, a novel by Zoë Wicomb, is one of the most recently published Women Writing Africa books. It revisits painful and overlooked aspects of recent South African experience: the problematic modern history of mixed-race "coloureds"; the internecine, sometimes lethal conflicts within the liberation movement itself; and the treatment of women by their male comrades in the struggle against apartheid. David's Story echoes the wrenching disclosures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by the Mandela government.

The ambivalence of the book's freedom-fighter protagonist, David Dirkse, is key to the novel. After the 1991 unbanning of the ANC and Mandela's release, David discovers his own name on a hit list, and has cause to reflect upon his role in the movement. He at once recoils from the tactics of the freedom struggle and accepts their justification. Married to Sally, who also trained in the underground, David has broken the code of the resistance and become emotionally involved with another guerrilla fighter, Dulcie. Now being subjected to repeated torture, Dulcie haunts the text, much like Toni Morrison's character Beloved.

In the historical sections that interrupt the contemporary narrative, David's Story explores the complex and little-known history of the Griquas. Classified as "coloured" under apartheid, this mixed-race people are descended from the native inhabitants of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope the Khoisan (called "Hottentots" and "Bushmen" by whites), and the Cape's early European settlers.