Claire C. Robertson

Katrijn van der Caab, freed slave and wigmaker's apprentice, travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang, a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services. The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love.Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away, Sister Vergilius, a nun at a mission hospital, wants to free herself from an austere order. It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer an Englishman and suspected Communist who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born, desire is unfurling slowly.

The Spiral House

Berida Ndambuki

Here is the life history of Berida Ndambuki, a Kenyan woman trader born in 1936, who speaks movingly of her experiences under the turbulences of late British colonialism and independence. A poverty survivor, Berida overcame patriarchal constraints to reclaim the rights to her labor, her body, and her spirit. She invokes a many-faceted picture of central Kenyan life in this compelling narrative.

Stories from Berida's Life

We Only Come Here to Struggle

Relates women's involvement in the staples trade to enhanced self-confidence, the rise of women's organizations, and changes in government policies. Examining this commodity, often taken for granted like the women traders, the author suggests other areas of exploration - women developing new relationships to their world.

Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890-1990

Trouble Showed the Way

Stanlie Myrise James

Extrait de la couverture : "[This book] is a much-needed response to the ethnocentric and arrogant Western perceptions surrounding female genital cutting (FGC), often referred to as either female genital mutilation or female circumcision but including a variety of practices of varying history, severity, geographical distribution, and consequences. In five provocative essays, the contributors to this timely volume challenge representations of FCG. In doing so, they interweave a range of perspectives, including history, human rights, law ... Balancing feminist ideals with culturally conscious approaches, they dispel sensationalized and widely accepted concepts about FCG that influence Western media, law, and feminism thought."

Disputing U.S. Polemics

Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood

"Set in Natal in the nineteenth century among the settlers and the homesteaders and the sugar-cane farmers, Claire Robertson0́9s masterful new novel Under Glass tells the story of Mrs Chetwyn, who arrives in Port Natal from India in 1856. She is with her eldest daughter and her ayah, and has been travelling for eleven months to join her husband, already deep in the hinterland.Her father-in-law has staked them their passage, a sum for settlement and an arrangement for the purchase of land, but there are conditions to his generosity that will have a lasting effect on the Chetwyns, specially on their fifth child, Cosmo, born years later. It is on the Chetwyns0́9 sugar-cane farm that the reader begins to understand that there is something strange about Cosmo, something that must be kept secret or hidden. At once a deeply researched historical novel and an intriguing mystery, Under Glass is a high-stakes narrative of deception and disguise that will appeal to a range of readers of literary fiction by one of the country0́9s finest novelists"--provided by publisher.

Claire C. Robertson

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