"Born in Natal Colony, Dhlomo was educated in local schools, before training as a teacher at Adams College.
He was very active in social affairs during the 1920s, which resulted in several articles published by him in newspapers such as Ilanga Lase Natal in Durban and Bantu World.
This Progressivism was part of Dhlomo's earlier writing and centred on Western-style education, "civilisation", moderation, anti-tribalism etc.
Examples of this kind in Dhlomo's writing are The Girl who killed to Save and Ntsikana, which are in the line of Progressivist ideas and justify white policy.
As a poet, he often published his work first in Ilanga Lase Natal, and his best known collection, The Valley of a Thousand Hills, was produced in 1941.
[1] He increasingly dedicated his life to writing and gradually shifted his position away from progressivism, which seemed not to progress very much, to slightly more radical political viewpoints.
The play, apart from what critics have called "subromantic diction", has long novelistic passages that make it difficult as a text for reading and nearly unplayable on the stage.
He thus prefigured many later African writers in the 20th century, such as Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe and many others, whose bi-cultural education and background made them see the parallels between the basic mythical structures that underlie most cultures.
Dhlomo's personal grievance coincided with a general trend, strengthened by the nationalistic ideas held by the ANC of the time.
The general trend from tutelage to protest, to resistance against political oppression of blacks has its roots in that era and continues to the very day.
While city Fathers boast suburbs select; Where minds diseased and dead to Love make gains Through drunkards, widows, waifs and worker’s pains (…) During his last years, Dhlomo wrote almost exclusively on contemporary matters, which he sought to render in a dynamic and lively form.
This work of the 1940s actually exhibits streaks of both Marxism and Nationalism when it talks about the exploitation of black workers and understands itself as a "fight with greater confidence to become a citizen of the country of our birth", respectively.
As Dhlomo died after a long illness in 1956, his literary oeuvre was already considerable: dozens of plays and short stories, and over one hundred poems complement his regular editorial and political work.