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.

About the Author

Kagiso Lesego Molope is an award-winning Indigenous South African storyteller and playwright. She is the author of four novels for young adults, including Such a Lonely, Lovely Road and This Book Betrays My Brother. She has been three times nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award, and the 2019 Inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. In 2016, Molope was the second writer-in-residence for the British Council's Small Wonder International Festival. Her works are read in schools in parts of Europe. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory.