The passing of Zoë Wicomb has prompted a global outpouring of tributes, particularly from black women writers and scholars who recognize her as a fearless critic of colonial and racial mythologies. Throughout her career, Wicomb resisted simplistic political narratives and instead insisted on complexity, dedicating herself to unraveling the social fictions—of race, gender, memory, and power—that continue to shape South African society. Her seminal works, including her 1998 essay on shame and her critical engagement with figures like Sara Baartman, revealed how categories like “colouredness” were constructed through harmful historical associations and persistently influenced post-apartheid discourse. Though her nuanced deconstruction of these themes was sometimes misread as an endorsement of the very systems she challenged, her intellectual legacy aligns with thinkers like J.M. Coetzee in rigorously questioning—rather than naturalizing—racial and colonial narratives.

Wicomb’s work was deeply informed by Black Consciousness politics, which she defended strategically during the rise of coloured separatism in the 1990s, while also cautioning against identity politics that produced new forms of essentialism and exclusion. Though she wrote from Glasgow, her vision remained firmly grounded in the particulars of South African life, blending local insight with transhistorical perspective. Her writing moved between sharp social commentary—on colorism, beauty standards, and linguistic nuance—and lyrical evocations of place, such as the landscapes of Namaqualand where she was born. Combining critical rigor with poetic sensibility, Wicomb cultivated a unique literary and political voice, marked by attention to contradiction, irony, and care. Her passing represents the loss of a pioneering voice whose work continues to illuminate the complexities of identity, memory, and justice in South Africa and beyond.