The Scattering

Kubuitsile's deeply moving novel follows the fate of two young women, both caught in the jarring realities of colonial wars waged across southern Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. With a flair for depicting the human spirit and its resilience, she writes of Tjipuka, a victim of German deception and atrocities against the Herero people living in what is now Namibia, and Riette, the misfortunate daughter of a Boer farmer caught in the British-Boer conflict in Transvaal, now northeastern South Africa.Tjipuka, the Herero woman, marries and has a child with the love of her life. Thinking German soldiers have killed her husband, she flees with her son to the desert, to get away from the Germans. Riette, a bright Boer woman, has passed her nursing exams and plans to escape the strict rules of her family, until her father forces her to marry an older man with two daughters. When her husband is taken captive by the British, she resolves to save herself and her stepchildren from being caught in the crosshairs of civil war. Through Kubuitsile's evocative, sensitive writing, we become one with these women as they are forced to make impossible choices.