Farida Karoida was born in the eastern Cape province, a location that inspired the setting for her first novel, Daughters of Twilight (1986).
[2] She remained there, where she published her first novel and wrote in multiple mediums, including film, television, and CBC radio dramas.
Her novel A Shattering of Silence (1993), set during the Mozambique civil war, follows Faith, the daughter of Canadian missionaries, after the murder of her parents.
Daughters of Twilight, for instance, "did not receive the critical attention or acclaim it derives in Canada" while "it was nominated for the Fawcett Literature Prize in Great Britain" (78), and after "reworking [that novel] "as the first part of a three-part multigenerational saga entitled Other Secrets published by Penguin in 2000, [this] also received a prestigious nomination, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, though it did not enjoy a long shelf-life in print" (78).
[that] do not fully belong to a small minority of writers of European origin who speak from the historical centre [sic] of institutionalized power nor do they belong to the vast majority of indigenous African withers who speak form the cultural and political centre [sic] of the post-colonial condition.
.What the in-between, or to use Karoida's titular phrase, 'twilight' atmosphere of these texts undermines is the diasporic community's sense of volatility in Africa as a twice-displaced people, that is, both in their historical displacement from the Indian subcontinent and in their status as a political and rival minority in the new land" (79).
[5] Similarly, Ronit Frenkel in Reconsiderations: South African Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture (2010) positions Karodia's work, in particular Other Secrets, as part of small group of South African literature offering "alternative narratives to the TRC [ Truth and Reconciliation Commission ], which reveal the 'ordinary' impact of apartheid in a way that the Commission did not" (112).