5 of the best holiday reads

TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST

BY ALEXANDRA FULLER

After her father’s sudden death, bestselling author Alexandra Fuller realises that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins Travel Light, Move Fast, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and who was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost – he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen altogether, all at once or not at all. Now, in the wake of his death, Fuller internalises his lessons with clear eyes, and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father’s death as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence… and she remembers her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller’s Africa, is a story of joy, resilience and vitality, from one of our finest writers.

BORDERLINE

BY MARITA VAN DER VYVER

A letter among her deceased ex-husband’s belongings rips open Theresa’s world. For years she has turned her back on Theo – a man who spent the last two decades of his life institutionalised – and on their shared past in a country where teenage boys were conscripted to fight on ‘the Border’ in a war that those back home knew little about. Least of all Theresa, who spent her days dreaming of discos and first kisses.

Realising that the letter was written by a Cuban soldier and addressed to his child – who, if still alive, would be at least forty years old – Theresa heads for Cuba: to search for the soldier’s child, to deliver the letter, to atone in some way for Theo’s deeds and for her own ignorance. In sultry Cuba, amid its picturesque 1950s cars and the fragrant smoke of its cigars, Theresa’s search connects her intimately with those branded ‘the enemy’ during the war in Angola as she begins to unravel what growing up in the South Africa of that time really meant. 2

BASSIE –MY JOURNEY OF HOPE

BY BASETSANA KUMALO

Basetsana Kumalo shot to fame as Miss South Africa in 1994 and soon became the face of South Africa’s new democracy. As the first black presenter of the glamorous lifestyle TV show Top Billing, she travelled the world and interviewed legends like Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Luther Vandross. After a successful career in front of the camera, Bassie’s drive and ambition took her into the world of business and entrepreneurship. The street savvy that her entrepreneurial mother bestowed on her as a child stood her in good stead as she built a media empire.

In Bassie – My Journey of Hope, Bassie recounts her life journey, including her relationships with mentors like Nelson Mandela. She also shares the secrets of her success and all the lessons she’s learnt along the way. She opens up about the pressures of her high-profile marriage to Romeo Kumalo and their heart-breaking struggle to have a family. She talks honestly about motherhood and maintaining a healthy work/life balance, and unpacks how she pays it forward through mentoring young people she has met along the way.

Bassie also describes the legal battles she has had to wage in order to protect her name and her brand over the years. She gives a chilling account of the stalker who has harassed her for decades, and the spurious ‘sex-tape’ allegation that rocked her family and almost destroyed her career. Bassie’s enthusiasm, humour and hope infuses every page of her memoir, making it an intimate, inspiring and entertaining account of a remarkable life.

A SIN OF OMISSION

BY MARGUERITE POLAND

“It is hard to be in exile... But it is harder to return.” Through the hills and dales of the Eastern Cape, Stephen (Malusi) Mzamane, a young Anglican priest, must journey to his mother’s rural home to inform her of his elder brother’s death. First educated at the Native College in Grahamstown, Stephen was sent to England in 1869 for training at the Missionary College in Canterbury.

But on his return to South Africa, relegated to a remote, dilapidated mission near Fort Beaufort, he had to confront not only the prejudices of a colonial society but the insidious discrimination within the Church itself. Increasingly conflicted between his loyalties to the amaNgqika people, for whom his brother fought, and the colonial cause he as Reverend Mzamane is expected to uphold, Stephen’s journey to his mother’s home proves decisive in resolving the contradictions that tear at his heart. This novel is based on a real historical character.

THE NIGHT TRAINS

BY CHARLES VAN ONSELEN

The price exacted from across the African sub-continent for South Africa’s stalled 20 th -century industrial revolution is, in human terms, still largely hidden from history. In this new book, eminent historian Charles Van Onselen explores how the people of southern Mozambique – bent double beneath the historical loads of forced labour and slavery, and then sold-off en masse as contracted labourers to the new coal and gold mines of the Witwatersrand by a Portuguese administration – paid the highest price for the development of South Africa’s primary industry. The privately-operated, nightly labour trains running between Booysens and Ressano Garcia left deep scars in the urban and rural cultures of black communities, whether in the form of popular songs, such as Stimela and Shosholoza, or in a belief in nocturnal witches’ trains that captured and conveyed zombie workers to the region’s most unpopular places of employment. Mozambican migrant labour formed an integral part of a largely hidden, parallel universe that created the wealth of 20 th -century South Africa, and some of the deepest roots of an ongoing tragedy lie, to this very day, besides the rails of the Eastern Main Line.