Have You Read
Pamela Jooste
 
Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter 1997
'My name is Lily Daniels and I live in The Valley, in an old house at the top of a hill with a loquat tree in the garden. We are all women in our house. My grandmother, my Aunt Stella with her hopalong leg, and me. The men in our family are not worth much. They are the cross we have to bear. Some of us, like my mother, don't live here any more. People say she went on the Kimberley train to try for white and I mustn't blame her because she could get away with it even if we didn't believe she would.' Through the sharp yet loving eyes of eleven-year-old Lily we see the whole exotic, vivid, vigorous culture of the Cape Coloured community at the time when apartheid threatened its destruction. As Lily's beautiful but angry mother returns to Cape Town, determined to fight for justice for her family, so the story of Lily's past - and future - erupts. "Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter" is a powerful and moving tribute to a richly individual people.
Frieda and Min 1999
When Frieda first met Min, with her golden hair and ivory bones, what struck her most was that Min was wearing a pair of African sandals, the sort made out of old car tyres. She was a silent, unhappy girl, dumped on Frieda's exuberant family in Johannesburg for the summer of 1964 so that her mother could go off with her new husband. In a way, Min and Frieda were both outsiders - Min, raised in the bush by her idealistic doctor father, and Frieda, daughter of a poor Jewish saxophone player who lived almost on top of a native neighborhood. The two girls, thrown together - the 'white kaffir' and the poor Jewish girl - formed a strange but loyal friendship, a friendship that was to last even through the terrible years of oppression and betrayal during the time of South Africa under Apartheid
Like Water in Wild Places 2000
People Like Ourselves 2003
Star Of The Morning 2007

The haunting story of two orphaned sisters at the mercy of South Africa's apartheid system.

“I knew then that there were some things not even Ruby could keep from me forever and this was one of them. We were coloured girls in a white world that didn't want us.”

Born on the wrong side of a racial divide in apartheid-torn Cape Town, young sisters Ruby and Rose exist in a world where they are not welcome. As part of the Cape Coloured community they are considered socially inferior. Yet, even within their own social group the sisters live down the poor end of town. Their father was killed when they were very small, so when their mother dies after a protracted illness, Ruby and Rose's fate falls into the hands of Aunt Olive. Ruby knows without being told that their aunt's home will not be opened to them — charity does not extend to the poor relations who would cast a smudge on such a respectable house. Aunt Olive condemns her nieces to the local orphanage, relieving her conscience with monthly invitations to Sunday lunch.

In the orphanage, the girls grow up sheltered from a divided world that they do not yet fully understand, but the day approaches when they must forge their own paths in life and confront the lessons that apartheid enforces.

 
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