Scatterlings: A Novel

"Rešoketšwe Manenzhe is Pedi, I’m Zulu. She is what we consider a ‘born free.’ (I’m probably also a born free: I was born in 1986. I don’t remember what was happening in 1994, but I do remember the songs.) Like Koleka Putuma, she is a young writer who is able to take these stories from before, the pain and joy, and put them into her work. Scatterlings really should be up there. The main topic is the Immorality Act, which was put into effect by the apartheid government in 1927. It meant that if you were black and married to a white person, or if you were black and in a relationship with a white person, it was now a crime and you would be arrested. If you were a man, I think you would spend five years in prison; for a woman, it was four years. I like the way she’s told the story. It falls under historical fiction, and I don’t think I have any other historical novels on this list. Another author who has written a fictional work that touches on the Immorality Act and also did it brilliantly was Zakes Mda. For me, for a young woman to write a story like this of such importance is really, truly amazing. So it’s set in South Africa during apartheid, when the Immorality Act was put in place, and it affects this family. It’s about a white man who’s called Abraham—quite a biblical name—his wife, and their two daughters. The wife, because of the trauma of the Immorality Act, burns herself. She dies by fire. One of the daughters survives. Her name is Dido. It’s just her and her dad, and it’s about their journey of navigating this Immorality Act. As a white person, Abraham comes to experience what it means to be in a black person’s shoes through his family and the falling apart of his family. It’s about how some of South Africa’s laws, going back to the Natives’ Land Act, tore families apart. This isn’t to say that the families were intact; obviously, they had their own problems. There was also the Group Areas Act, when you were moved from your home because your suburb was now said to be a white area. The book speaks to that, and the effects of that, and the falling apart of families because of those decisions. Yes, it’s heavy. But it is very readable."