Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali the son of Joseph Josiah Mtshali and Florence Mathobi Mtshali.

Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, (born 1940, Vryheid, Natal, South Africa), South African poet who wrote in English and Zulu and whose work drew deeply upon the immediate experience of life in the Johannesburg township of Soweto

He married Margaret Mntambo in 1968 (divorced 1975) he has four children.

Mtshali worked as a messenger before his first collection of poems, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971), won the Olive Schreiner Prize for 1974. After studying in the United States at the University of Iowaand Columbia University (New York), Mtshali returned to South Africa in 1979 and taught at a private school in Soweto. His second volume of poems, Fireflames(1980), was banned by the South African government because it was dedicated to the schoolchildren of Soweto, an obvious reference to the uprising there in 1976. Mtshali later edited the nonfiction work Give Us a Break: Diaries of a Group of Soweto Children (1988).

The meaning behind Oswald poems were poems that seek to address the issues of socio-political injustice, apartheid, oppression and man's inhumanity to man in the society, a kind of counter – attacking the apartheid system of the South African society, which allows for inequalities and abject poverty of a section of the society 

Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali will always be remembered as one of South Africa’s greatest writes, as well as a loving father and a loving husband.