The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena

Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century. Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people's subjugation, Poppie Nongena - a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township - has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bearing witness to her degradation, Poppie is forced on a spiritual and cultural journey from Lambert's Bay to a Cape Town township to Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape. Her heartache is the pain of a nation - an emblem of how the human spirit may strain under the weight of tyranny, yet adapts and prevails.Written to break the barrier of ignorance in late-1970s South Africa, The Long, Journey of Poppie Nongena - unsentimental but sensitive - documents a harrowing life lived in a time that a country would...