Achmat was born in Newclare. When he was a young boy, he lived with his maternal grandmother in Fordsburg. He moved regularly between these Johannesburg suburbs and witnessed apartheid being implemented. After completing school, Achmat spent a year in Cape Town working as a clerk on the docks and living in District Six where he once again witnessed the destruction of neighbourhoods and racial rezoning. Achmat recalled:

“I think I always knew I would be a writer, but when I finished high school and for the first time resisted my father’s will and didn’t become an accountant, I went to Cape Town. I lived in District Six … and I had to record it…That’s when I knew—sitting there and recording what I saw in front of me.”

In Cape Town Achmat spent much of his time writing and within a year drafted many of the stories to be published in 1981 in his novella Waiting for Leila. Later, Achmat won a scholarship to attend Rhodes University and enrolled for a degree in English literature. He was deeply involved in the Black Consciousness Movement and president of the Labour Youth Organisation (the youth wing of the Labour Party). With other writers, including his lifelong friend Don Mattera, he formed a writers’ collective named Black Thoughts, which he described in “Another country”, published in the UK Guardian in 2004. He wrote: 

About 20 of us got together and started a writers’ group called Black Thoughts; we were determined to be part of the ‘revolution’ we could see unfolding. Our self-assigned role was to correct the cultural distortions that apartheid was imposing on us. ‘Civilisation’ was by definition not only western, but European, and civilised discourse could only properly take place in languages of European origin. At school, black students were forced to receive instruction in Afrikaans; English was relegated to a third language, and learners would be exposed to it only through the ‘classics’. Shakespeare, Hardy, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so forth; worthy as they were in their own right, these were not African writers – looking for an African writer, our ’masters’ turned to H Rider Haggard. 

The Black Thoughts collective would correct that. Africa was emerging from colonialism, however falteringly, and, through its writers, we resolved to bring it to township audiences: small groups of students, civic activists, trade unionists, church congregations, anyone who would listen to us. We would infuse a new sense of pride in black people, even the informers who followed us everywhere, reporting with enforced zeal on those amateur troubadour events. The atmosphere was charged with romantic, clandestine energy; lookouts watched out for the police and upon a whistled warning a fiery poetry recital would quickly subside into the Lord’s Prayer. 

Other writers’ organisations were established. Achmat’s colleague and friend Njabulo Ndebele, writing in 1988, noted “the Writers’ and Artists’ Guild of South Africa was established in 1974. Then there was the phenomenal mushrooming of writers’ and cultural groups in the townships throughout the country in the mid-1970s” after the creation of Black Thoughts. At least twenty-five groups were recorded, including: Creative Youth Association of Diepkloof, Soweto; Moakeng League of Painters and Authors (MALEPA) of Bloemfontein and Kroonstad; GaRankuwa Art Association; the Guyo Book Club of Sibasa; Mpumalanga Arts of Hammersdale; Community Arts Project of Cape Town; Peyarta (Port Elizabeth Young Artists Association). The last writers’ organisation founded in this decade was Poets, Essayist and Novelists (PEN) in Johannesburg in 1978.

In 1972, one of Achmat’s poems was published in the literary magazine Izwi/Voice/Stem. The magazine was in its second year. The year before Izwi took over from the anti-establishment artistic and literary English and Afrikaans magazine called Wurm (Worm). Izwi aimed to publish works by young previously unpublished writers. Achmat, Don Mattera; Njabulo Ndebele and Sipho Sepamla were among 150 writers and poets whose work was published in the brief four-year life span of the magazine. Izwi’s “contemporaries”, its editor Stephen Gray noted, “Contrast (Cape Town), Ophir (Pretoria), New Coin (Grahamstown) and Bolt (Durban) were alternatives to the harsh literary, moral and political censorship of the apartheid regime of the 70s. They allowed freedom of expression, not only in subject matter but also in style.” 

Achmat’s activities in Black Thoughts and as a youth leader and student politician, led to a five-year banning order, issued a day after his twenty-fifth birthday. It prohibited him from publishing between 1973 and 1978 and he was no longer able to study at Rhodes. However, Achmat’s banning order did give him space to develop his craft and he “came to need to write.” He spent the following years refining earlier writings, some of which would be published in his first novella Waiting for Leila (1981) and his first collection of poems Bulldozer (1983). 

In 1977, Achmat abandoned writing in Afrikaans. In an interview conducted by Jansie Kotze and Ruth Harris, he explained: “I gave up (writing in Afrikaans) in 1977 for political reasons, or so I thought at the time but now it feels as though it was for other reasons. When I switched over to English a whole new world opened up as I did not have access to the Afrikaans publishing structures.” When his banning order was lifted, he set out to publish his work. Some poems and short stories were published in Ravan Press’s magazine Staffrider launched in 1978. In 1979 the manuscript of “Waiting for Leila”, won the Mofolo-Plomer Prize, which was awarded to unpublished manuscripts.

In 1988 Achmat, then Executive Director of Kagiso Trust, chair of the Transvaal branch of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) and member of the cultural desk of the United Democratic Front (UDF), was in Toronto, Canada. During a wide-ranging discussion with members of the Southern Africa Report collective, Achmat spoke about COSAW, the responsibilities of black writers and the task that lay ahead in South Africa in the 1980s. He also reflected on the 1970s:

“That literature, the product of Black Consciousness, was vibrant and creative, voicing our protest through poetry, plays. Some of it good, some of it bad. The importance of that era was that it did give an impetus to South African literature that carried into the 1980s. But now we had to look at it in a different light. Protest literature had not gone much beyond protest. It was not enough to have a culture of protest, of standing up and saying we protest against all the intellectual, cultural and physical atrocities that apartheid has imposed upon us. Apartheid was the only beacon of our literary horizons. We were actually allowing the state and the repressions of the apartheid system to create the circumstances within which we were functioning, to prescribe to us what we wrote about. We were not able to go be yond merely describing the agony of our people. We could so easily create a literature that was critical of apartheid but we did not write about what we stood for, what our aspirations were and what kind of culture we wanted to create. So much of our writing did not illuminate the struggle of the people, only highlighted their agony.

But what happened in the ’70s with the bannings of the political organisations and the destruction of the last forms of opposition in the country, intellectuals found themselves inheriting the mantle of leadership. They unfortunately took that to be their natural right after that. They felt that they could direct the political struggle from the ivory towers of universities and by writing books that merely examined the struggles of people without themselves becoming integrally involved at a very basic level. 

Intellectuals were remaining aloof at the time when grassroots communities were struggling to create for themselves political structures that could adequately represent them and advance their struggle. There were various writers and cultural groups that met to discuss these questions. We would articulate the suffering of our people, but were unable to go beyond that.”