Muronga is a village boy from a rural area in the north of what is now Namibia. The time: probably the late 1960's. Muronga lives an isolated life in a traditional village setting. He has just married and the story starts at the day that he becomes a father. However, the quiet rhythm of life in the village is disturbed by the wider world. It starts with Christianity settling in through a local mission, but soon things change even more. As the colonial administration starts to demand taxes, young men are sent away to earn money, to be able to pay these taxes. Muronga leaves for the mines in South Africa, where he is confronted with the blatant racism of white South Africans and gets involved with the anti-colonial movement of South West Africa.

I thought this was a charming novel, even if it were only for the fact that it is hard to find Namibian novels at all, let alone ones that have been translated into a language that I can read. It opened a new world, even if I wasn't completely unfamiliar with it, having studied cultural anthropology in the past. However, a novel gives you quite a different - inside out- view than a textbook ever could give you.

The fact that I was so charmed by this book makes it difficult to judge it in a very critical way. As I normally do... It is not comparable with works by literary masters: it's written in very simple language, there are huge leaps in time that make the development of the main character perhaps a little hard to follow (from a timid village boy to one of the leaders of the liberation movement, just like that). However, it is a novel that deserves to be read, if only to open your eyes for a forgotten country with a sad history. ( )

This novel starts in a typical African way: young man in a village, Muronga, is married and expecting his first child. While many African stories cover the youth's emergence to teen years and first romances, this one starts with the man being torn between the pull of family and traditional life, and the custom of being required to leave the village to do semi-voluntary labor in farms or diamond mines or gold mines of the early Apartheid state of South Africa (which included a territory called South West Africa which is traditionally known as Namibia). Muronga makes the choice to leave to make money for taxes imposed by the white government and to make incremental money if possible. The story tells of his travails as he is subject to discrimination, abuse, imprisonment, and other indignities. Separated from his family, his best friend Kaye, and his home, Muronga acclimates to the work camp life and ultimately is pushed by Apartheid--and the evidence of successful sister countries in Africa breaking free of colonialism - into beginning to rebel against slavery. The book is a type of subtle political polemic against Apartheid and very effective in it's goal. An activist book probably more direct and compelling than Steinbeck's call for unionization, it's a wonderful and risky story. ( )