We Inherit the Fire

About the book

A gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter – set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.

There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare …

In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under...