Booklist
What was it like to be a parent during the 1976 student riots in Cape Town, supportive of the rebellion but appalled to see your own children boycott school and lose their chance for a future? What was it like to live without electricity, telephone, running water? To study without space and quiet? Deserted by her husband at age 23 with three children under 6, Magona made it out of the black ghetto of Guguletu in the next 12 years, got herself through high school and college, then to grad school at Columbia, and finally to a job in New York. There is sometimes too much local detail for American readers, but Magona writes with wit and passion. She is frank about her failures as a mother, funny about her culture shock, wry about her achievement, furious with soulful whites who ask her, "What do your people want?" --implying that all blacks are the same and that no whites can know them. Her candid, dramatic memoir makes us know the politics of apartheid through the particulars of her personal story. Hazel Rochman
