Set during the devastating war in Mozambique in the 1980s, Lília Momplé's short novel Neighbours tells the story of some few individuals in the capital of Maputo. Neighbours is as good a place as any to begin exploring the notion of “Southern Africa.” A distinctive aspect of Southern African literature from the twentieth century is what Ranka Primorac has identified as a “frontline” imaginary. The discussion is guided by the assumption that Southern African literature is formed by and to some extent formative of the embattled modernities of the subcontinent. In this chapter, special attention is paid to how verbal art is conditioned by its main enabling media technologies, orality and print, but without assuming a teleological progression from one to the other, or rigid boundaries between them.