The book looks at the socialist realist theoretical principles and how these apply to works by Alex La Guma, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Mirri and Gonzo H. Musengezi. These are authors who come from different parts of Africa and whose experiences helped shape their world-views since, for Marxists, "social reality is not an indistinct background out of which literature emerges or into which it blends' Ann Jefferson and David Robey (1988:13) but plays a very crucial role in the composition of literary works. All the countries from which the authors in question come from were once colonized and have not, like any other such country, fully recovered from the ravages of the scourge of colonialism.