Synopsis
"When I set out to write this book, I thought about how horrible tragedies like war are often given to us in numbers. The mortality rate in the concentration camps was between 45 75%, with 12 18 people dying every day. You feel war and tragedy in your heart when it is brought down to the individual life. That's what I wanted. I wanted to create a novel that made war real through individual stories." Lauri Kubuitsile
Kubuitsile's deeply moving novel follows the fate of two young women, both caught in the jarring realities of colonial wars waged across southern Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. With a flair for depicting the human spirit and its resilience, she writes of Tjipuka, a victim of German deception and atrocities against the Herero people living in what is now Namibia, and Riette, the misfortunate daughter of a Boer farmer caught in the BritishBoer conflict in Transvaal, now northeastern South Africa.
Tjipuka, the Herero woman, marries and has a child with the love of her life. Thinking German soldiers have killed her husband, she flees with her son to the desert, to get away from the Germans. Riette, a bright Boer woman, has passed her nursing exams and plans to escape the strict rules of her family, until her father forces her to marry an older man with two daughters. When her husband is taken captive by the British, she resolves to save herself and her stepchildren from being caught in the crosshairs of civil war. Through Kubuitsile's evocative, sensitive writing, we become one with these women as they are forced to make impossible choices.
Other titles by African writers from Waveland Press:
Amadi, The Concubine (ISBN 9781478634607)
Andreas, The Purple Violet of Oshaantu (ISBN 9781478634584)
Campbell, My Children Have Faces (ISBN 9781478635017)
Head, The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (ISBN 9781478607601)
Head, Maru (ISBN 9781478607618)
Head, A Question of Power (ISBN 9781478634690)
Head, When Rain Clouds Gather (ISBN 9781478607595)
La Guma, In the Fog of the Seasons' End (ISBN 9781478600251)
Plaatje, Mhudi (ISBN 9781478609575)
Tadjo, The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (ISBN 9781478627814)
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
