This book examines South Africa's alternative press, which has played a crucial but largely undocumented role in the making of modern South Africa. Mirroring political realities that differed substantially from those projected by the established, white-owned commercial presses, the alternative press had its origins in African mission journals from the 1860s and 1870s. By the 1880s, an independent African protest emerged.

South Africa's Coloured and Indian communities were represented by their own protest publications from the early 1900s, while South Africa's expanding black urban working-class population communicated their concerns through various socialist publications in the first decades of the twentieth century. Only in the 1950s did a nonracial resistance press emerge.

Representing South Africa's marginalized communities to themselves and to the outside world for more than a century, these newspapers, newsletters, journals, and magazines constitute a unique political, social, and literary archive - the oldest, most extensive and varied collection of indigenous publications this kind in sub-Saharan Africa.