* the novel which created a sensation when first published in Afrikaans as Die Swerfjare van Popple Nongena
. won three literary prizes
serialised in Fair Lady
became a bestseller
now translated into English
Poppie is the story of a family over three generations, and of one woman's struggle to keep it together in the teeth of a system which makes life a sequence of uprooting and separation. For Poppie and her family are black and live in present day South Africa.
Though her story spans Sharpeville and Soweto, it is never strident, never a political tract. Elsa Joubert's concerns are less with h politics than with breaking down barriers of ignorance. ignorance. Her novel makes its points simply, dispassionately, and in doing so becomes the totally unsentimentalised celebration of the human capacity to survive and of the tenacious spirit that is Poppie.
Poppie's contented Cape Province childhood ends when she marries a migrant worker, and is forced to move with him and their young family to the alarming world of Cape Town. But no sooner has she established her roots in the new township than the authorities which had brought the family to the city want to move Poppie right away to the Ciskei, her husband's homeland. He, as a migrant labourer, may stay in the Cape.
On a brief bridal visit to his people in 'the land' Poppie had seen enough of the very different world of the tribal Xhosas to recognise it as a way of life her own forebears left behind them three generations ago. To her and to them the Ciskei is the past, dismissed as 'Kaffirland' by the urban blacks.
So for ten years Poppie fights the pass laws, winning limited extensions to the permit which will allow her to stay and work in Cape Town, in her struggle to hold her family together and get her children an education, even if paying for this means working 'sleep in' and seeing them fleetingly herself. But the day comes when there are no more extensions. Poppie and her children are 'resettled' in a raw new township near East London.
Hard cover
General good condition

Condition: Good