African Women: Three Generations

The author of Kaffir Boy recounts the saga of his grandmother, mother, and sister, who survived extraordinary conditions under tribal culture, colonialism, and apartheid, and raised families despite an atmosphere of violence and double standards. $40,000 ad/promo. Tour.

Mathabane won a wide readership with Kaffir Boy , his account of growing up in apartheid South Africa, and its sequel Kaffir Boy in America. Here he presents a gritty oral history of his grandmother, mother and sister, who overcame relationships with abusive men and struggled to maintain their self-reliance and dignity. His maternal grandmother, Ellen, tells a harrowing tale of being abandoned by her husband for another woman, and of watching her father and brother die, victims of witchcraft. Ellen's daughter, Geli (the author's mother), was sold for the traditional bride-price to a man she abhorred, a compulsive gambler who beat her and drove her into temporary insanity. Florah, Mathabane's sister, took part in looting and mob violence in the 1976 anti-apartheid student rebellion; later, a single mother, she struggled to extricate herself from a relationship with an ex-convict. The alternating first-person narratives are reconstructed from interviews which Mathabane's wife conducted with these three women, leaving a reader with the impression that the jarringly articulate testimonies that appear here have been heavily reworded by the author. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The South African-born Mathabane strains to tell the stories of his sister, mother, and grandmother, illuminating some lesser- known facets of black life under apartheid. Wanting to tell of the unsung struggles of black women in South Africa, Mathabane (co-author of Love in Black and White, 1991; Kaffir Boy in America, 1989; Kaffir Boy, 1986) probes his family in cycles of short chapters. Sister Florah found her marriage complicated by lobola, the traditional bride price. Mother Geli suffered through a marriage to an older man she didn't love. The author's Granny, abandoned in her village by her philandering, city-employed husband, bravely moved on her own to Johannesburg. All three women fought for safety, work, and housing, suffering the indignities of life in the squalid, dangerous black township of Alexandra. Whites are mostly absent from these stories, and the country's political upheavals intrude only occasionally. More important are township neighbors, the local church, and the persistence of traditional practices, including puberty rituals and a widespread belief in witchcraft, which the author warns readers not to deride. Though Mathabane claims to tell the women's stories ``in their own words,'' this is no oral history; his heavy authorial hand repeatedly intrudes, for instance, in putting phrases such as ``the perfect anodyne'' or ``Poverty, with its thousand terrors, returned'' in the mouth of his illiterate Granny. A worthy subject, but its treatment is marred by the author's suspect style. (25 b&w photographs--not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This gripping saga by the author of Kaffir Boy ( LJ 5/15/86) presents a truthful, passionate, and illuminative biography of his great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother in South Africa. Mathabane vividly describes the shocking, heartbreaking stories of each generation of women as they struggle for independent incomes to support themselves and their children; while resisting apartheid, they must also resist the traditions imposed by their own society and the oppresion imposed by their men. The stories are an inspiration and tribute to millions of women worldwide in similar conditions. A thought-provoking book that is sure to deliver a strong message all who read it. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/93.
- Gayle S. Leach , Prince George's Cty. Memorial Lib. System, Largo, Md.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Mathabane's stunning bestseller Kaffir Boy (1986), about his coming-of-age in the slums of apartheid, his mother is a strong, quiet force who encourages him to study, break free, and finally to leave her behind and find his place as a writer in the U.S. Now he tells her life story, and those of his grandmother and sister, in three interwoven first-person memoirs that speak in harrowing detail of growing up female in South Africa. The accounts are long and repetitive (tighter editing would have made this much more intense), and it's sometimes hard to remember who's talking, especially since the three voices all sound the same. However, their connection is an important part of what they have to say: all tell of pain and grief, of women horribly abused--physically and emotionally--by the racist system, by desperate poverty, and by the cultural tradition that makes a woman the property of her husband. The violence seems overwhelming, and yet somehow these women remain a family and help each other find self-reliance. There's no sloganizing; rather, the political is made personal in scenes of daily confrontation, between women and men, between black and white. Hazel Rochman