The purpose of this article is to examine Amandla (by Miriam TIali) and Third Generation (by Sipho Sepamla) as anti-apartheid novels of resistance which are faced by a number of serious contradictions. The article is an attempt to analyse the ways in which these texts seek to cope, on the one hand, with what seems to be a lost cause, a struggle without an end, and on the other hand with their own status as fictional texts which attempt to change precisely that which seems to deny all possibilities of subversion. Both texts attempt to make sense of a reality which is perceived to be so horrifyingly real as to be fictional (in the sense of the fictive, unreal, ethereal). On the one hand the power of the apartheid state is seen to be insurmountable, and on the other hand, that stale has to be subverted and destroyed. The resulting dialectic, posited in the texts, of the state of affairs in reality and the state of affairs that is desired, can only be solved by the use of the trope of exile as an imaginary resolution to a very real contradiction in order to achieve at least some measure of conscientization in the readership.