South Africa flag Cultural books from South Africa

Recommended cultural books (3)
Travel the world without leaving your chair. If you are into cultural here are some cultural books from South Africa for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge.

1.

Hum If You Don't Know the Words by Bianca Marais EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy. Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have ... continue

2.
Sit Down and Listen

Sit Down and Listen: Stories from South Africa by Ellen Kuzwayo EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
'For so many years now,' writes the author of this delightful collection, 'we have owned our stories while owning so little else.' Ellen Kuzwayo's autobiography Call Me Woman was an international bestseller. At last we hear her extraordinarily distinct voice again, this time in a series of stories culled from her rich personal experience as community leader, social worker, teacher and black woman in South Africa. These tales explore the complex life of contemporary black South Africa through the traditional form of story-telling. But the stories themselves are no... continue

3.
The Power of One

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay EN

Rating: 4 (3 votes)
Description:
“The Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.” –The New York Times “Unabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independence–‘the power of one’–can prevail.” –Cleveland Plain Dealer In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives ... continue