I wish I knew my mentor

From a rising voice in post-Apartheid literature comes I Wish I Knew My Mentor, thesecond novel by Percy Makhuba, author of Cries of the Forgotten.

In 1935 as Johannesburg is expanding into the major metropolitan city of South Africa, Mandla Sithole, a young Zulu workman on a crew building Johannesburg's historic underground postal tunnels comes across a book hidden amongst the stones. On the first page is a stark warning for anyone underground to leave immediately. Alarmed for his safety and that of his fellow workers, Mandla, is forced to put aside ethnic rivalries and accept the help of Qhawe Nondela, an odd but courteous Xhosa co-worker, to smuggle the book out of the work site and begin reading it on the sly. Within its covers is a story that not only explains in great depth the events leading up to the reason for the author'swarning, but one which also changes the course of Mandla's life forever.

Against the backdrop of burgeoning Apartheid and ethnic rivalries, Percy Makhuba presents a world in which the lines between the living and the dead are blurred by thecommon restlessness of being human and where not only the exploitation of native African lands by the monumentally ambitious Boer population scars the lives of all in their path, but the Earth herself secretly nurses her pain and passes judgment on those who cut into her belly.

I Wish I Knew My Mentor takes to task the greed and ambition that led to Apartheid, one of the world's darkest examples of human beings' capacity for cruelty and yet alsocelebrates the possibilities within the human heart and spirit of the emotional transformation of hatred into a force for inner strength and real, abiding social change.

Dettagli