Produced by The Durban Moment that saw Steve Biko begin the South African Students' Organisation, Staffrider had a view of literature with a small "I": it's base was popular rather than elite and it sought to provide an autobiography of experience in its witness of daily black life in South Africa.
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But the magazine's early flexibility ensured that the work of previously unpublished writers and artists appeared alongside that of many South African notables including Nadine Gordimer, Lionel Abrahams, Rose Zwi, and Mtutuzeli Matshoba.