After the death of his older brother during military service, a young South African boy embarks on an odyssey of discovery, encountering a rich variety of colorful characters who reveal the complex issues and implications of apartheid.
Apartheid
Out of Bounds: Seven Stories of Conflict and Hope
We are the young people, We will not be broken! For almost fifty years, apartheid forced the young people of South Africa to live apart as Blacks, Whites, Indians, and “Coloreds.” This unique and dramatic collection of stories—by native South African and Carnegie Medalist Beverley Naidoo—is about young people’s choices in a beautiful country made ugly by injustice. Each story is set in a different decade during the turbulent years from 1948 to 2000, and portrays powerful fictional characters who are caught up in very real and often disturbing events.
The Year the Gypsies Came
Set in apartheid 1960s South Africa, twelve-year-old Emily Iris explains that her mother and father have always been eager to take in travelers and vagabonds, relying on the presence of outsiders to ease the tension between them. Emily has her gentle older sister, Sarah, and Buza, the old Zulu nightwatchman, for company and comfort. But her parents’ continuing discontent leads them to welcome some peculiar strangers. One spring, a family of wanderers—a wildlife photographer, his wife, and two boys—comes to stay, and their strange, compelling, and dangerous presence will leave the Iris family infinitely changed.
Afrika
For thirteen-year-old Kim, travel to South Africa with her journalist mother will mark the end of her childhood and the beginning of a remarkable journey. Expecting nothing more than three months in her mother’s homeland, Kim comes to terms with the country’s diverse and often shocking history. The Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in post-apartheid South Africa open her eyes to the tragedy and brutality of its segregationist policies.
Kim’s first meeting with her relatives, her contact with schoolmates and cousins, bring her face-to-face with the realization that she is not as removed from this powerful story as she thought. As her mother struggles with her past, Kim becomes more and more determined to unlock the secret that has always kept her from knowing her father. Helped by the young son of a long-time family servant, whose own father was a casualty of Apartheid history, Kim eventually unlocks her mystery and brings her mother and herself to their own truth and reconciliation.
The Acorn Eaters
An award-winning story by a Dutch author is set in the peasant country of Andalusia after the Spanish Civil War, when a poor youth struggles to help feed his family under the gun of the landowners.
Journey to Jo’burg: A South African Story
When their baby sister becomes dangerously ill, thirteen-year-old Naledi and her younger brother make a journey of over 300 kilometers from their village to Johannesburg, where their mother works as a maid for a white family.
Little Oh
A mother tells her son the story of Little Oh, a girl made of paper who becomes separated from her human mother.