Miriam's Song

Glamour

This memoir of growing up in South Africa during apartheid is alternately evocative and wrenching, but always inspiring....[It] captures both the brutality and beauty of their childhood.

Library Journal

Mark Mathabane, the author of Kaffir Boy, helps recount the life of his sister, who remained behind in South Africa after he left and witnessed its struggle to throw off apartheid. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Mary Ellen Sullivan

[Mathabane's] searingly honest account of this period when the townships were under siege by both their residents and the government brings a critical chapter of South African history to life. Now studying in the United States, Mathabane told her stories to her brother, who perfectly captures her guileless wisdom.
—The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

From the South African-born Mathabane (Kaffir Boy, 1986; African Women, 1994, etc.) comes this unsparingly graphic account of his sister's growing up in the last days of apartheid—when violence turned black townships into killing fields and schooling ceased as young Comrades insisted on liberation before education. The story told by Miriam, now studying in the US, is a searing indictment of the violence to women engendered both by apartheid and by traditional African attitudes. Both quashed human potential and aspirations, and good daughters and students like Miriam were as penalized as their more recalcitrant sisters. Born in 1969 and raised in Alexandria, a sprawling black township to the north of Johannesburg, Miriam offers vivid details of township life: the food eaten (a whole chicken was an undreamed-of luxury), the small houses (spotless despite the number of people living in them), and the ubiquitous scrawny dogs picking over the uncollected trash. She describes growing up as the middle daughter in a family made dysfunctional by circumstance. Her illiterate father, unable to find better-paying jobs, is often unemployed, drinks, gambles away their food money, and beats the children; her mother, a devout Christian, lacks the proper documentation and also has employment problems; and her elder brother steals Miriam's savings. The black schools are poorly equipped, the teachers are sadistic, and Miriam (who wants to become a nurse) soon finds her ambition thwarted by the times and by custom. A teenager in the 1980s, when anti-government violence made life in townships dangerous, she has to stay home when the schools are forced to close. Then, in a society where blackmentraditionally are free to do as they please (to take 13-year-old girls for wives, for example, as one of her uncle does), she is raped by her boyfriend and finds herself pregnant. But brother Mark, who has used his tennis talents as a passport to the US and success, will change Miriam's life. A moving story of a survivor, but Miriam herself often seems more a reporter recalling an eventful past than a reflective memoirist.