October: Torchbearers
by Wendy Maartens

It’s simply not good enough to have a great business idea, because that idea needs to work financially. Do you have the ability to make business decisions quickly based on facts, not the heart?

Mhudi is a historical novel set in the 1800s that tells the story of an African woman living during a war between the Barolong people, Matebele people and the Boers. Mhudi’s tribe, the Barolong, is attacked one evening by the Matebele. Amid the screams, bloodshed, and destruction—Mhudi escapes.

The women of 1956 marched to the Union building in unison because the pass laws that were oppressive. These women, from all backgrounds and races were torchbearers to a poet, social and legal advocates. These women, who are as colorful as their backgrounds and professions, share something common: the need to be somebody.

Maru is a story about a Masarwa woman, Margaret Cadmore, who was adopted and raised by a white woman during a time when the Masarwa people of Botswana were heavily discriminated against. Head writes “Masawra is the equivalent of ‘nigger’, a term of contempt which means, obliquely, a low filthy nation.”

As a young girl, during a drought in Zimbabwe, Elizabeth collapsed under a tree as a result of hunger and starvation. She was weak and in and out of consciousness. Moments later, a woman that Elizabeth did not recognise, gave her a meal. 

Tshepo, a young student at Rhodes, has a difficult time keeping up with his own strange mind. He is absorbed in making sense of a traumatic past in a violent country and so when he finds himself at the Valkenberg mental facility it is perhaps not entirely due to “cannabis-induced psychosis”.

Carried by impeccable lyrical writing, the 2022 novel examines themes of queerness, grief, friendship, and family. Set in the United Kingdom with hints of Nigerian life, this enthralling book reads like capricious weather.

A book about racism, the tensions between emotional religion and rational science and mental health.

“The book brings the reader up to speed with land's lengthy and complicated process. Assessed interventionist measures on their efficacies that mainly amounted to nought.”