We Inherit the Fire - by Kagiso Lesego Molope (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 apartheid.

Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother's illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.

Review Quotes

Praise for We Inherit the Fire

"Kagiso Lesego Molope writes with striking precision and intelligence, crafting prose that moves like poetry while speaking directly to the heart. This novel of the bonds and betrayals between mothers and daughters and the scars of a changing country sparks like a flame: dangerous and beautiful. Deftly weaving the less told stories of young women and the haunted memories of political prisoners in South Africa, We Inherit the Fire asks what it means to be truly known amidst the collective struggle."
--Janika Oza, author of A History of Burning

"We Inherit the Fire is a dazzling and poignant portrait of intergenerational love, trauma and resilience, about a hero mother and her teen daughter made strangers by apartheid's violence. A story that will leave you fired up and holding your heart at the same time."
--Farzana Doctor, author of Seven and The Beauty of Us

"Blazingly brilliant. In We Inherit the Fire, Kagiso Lesego Molope brews a simmering coming of age story about the mother of a nation alight with violent, racist, and colonial oppression. While apartheid has ended, Lesego Molope reminds us a nascent state is not a utopian, static place to arrive at. She deftly situates the reader in intergenerational transitions from childhood to adulthood, using youthful longing and nostalgia and the struggles of motherhood to sharply question whether habitual and ongoing suppression should be fought through quiet dignity or by professing legitimate anger. She asks us, where we find ourselves in repressive situations, what costs we are willing to bear and complicates ideals of the mother figure through a fiery character drawn as iconic, heroic, rationally hostile yet traumatized."
--Jamie Chai Yun Liew, author of Dandelion

"To the world, Kewame 'Dolly' Malaka is a freedom fighter, a symbol of unyielding resistance. To her daughter, she is both formidable and fragile, scarred by prison and loss. Amid the final tremors of apartheid, We Inherit the Fire is a haunting portrait of two lives bound by history and undone by its wounds; a mother and daughter wading through love, rage, and the unextinguishable blaze of memory."
--francesca ekwuyasi, author of Butter Honey Pig Bread

About the Author

Kagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She is the author of four other novels: Dancing in the Dust, which was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006; The Mending Season; Such a Lonely, Lovely Road; and This Book Betrays My Brother. She has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award four times. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction, and the 2019 inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. Across Southern Africa and in parts of Europe, her works are read in schools in several languages. She wrote the play Maya Angelou: Black Woman Rising, which was staged for five years at Oslo's Nordic Black Theatre. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.