Jamela and her family go to shoe store for her birthday gift. Jamela loves what the store clerk shows, but Jamela’s mama picks the practical & comfortable shoes for her. Although Jamela gets disappointed, she decorates her new shoes with beads and sparkly bits. When Jamela shows her special shoes, her mother doesn’t show support for Jamela. Lily, Jamela’s neighbor, liked Jamela’s decorated shoes and they make decorated shoes together. Lily names them Jamela’s shoes. In the market, their shoes sold like hotcakes. Jamela got her share from Lily. On Jamela’s birthday, Jamela gets very special gift from her mother as a consequence of the ‘ Jamela’s shoes’.
Jamela gets in trouble when she takes the expensive material intended for a new dress for Mama, parades it in the street, and allows it to become dirty and torn.
Jamela is responsible for fattening up the chicken intended for Christmas dinner, but instead she gives it a name and makes it her friend.
When Mama gets a new job and a new house, everyone is excited about moving except Jamela who likes her old house just fine.
In post-apartheid South Africa, a Zulu boy keeps secrets from his family as he cares for an injured dog and befriends the daughter of a white farmer.
A South African boy makes a long journey through the desert to join his parents in a mining village, reaching them on Christmas Day and seeing his new baby sister.
The children who play in the street laugh at the odd-job man Joseph for picking up string and other junk, until he shows them that magic can be found in even the simplest of things.
Nine-year-old Rebecca and her family, living in a South African village for black people, are threatened with forced removal to a bleak, distant development, to make room for a new suburb for whites.
After moving into the house on Zanzibar Road that her neighbors helped her build, Mama Jumbo decides to share it with Little Chico.
Goolam-Habib, a young boy who is new to a village surrounded by strawberry fields and who doesn’t speak, befriends an old man making a straw-filled doll, and soon the old man helps the boy find himself.