Book Title: WE INHERIT THE FIRE
Character: Kewame
How would you describe your family or your childhood?
I grew up with my mother and her sisters and my grandmother and grandfather all in the same house. My mother and aunts were very close and I was closer to my grandmother than I was to my mother.
What was your greatest talent?
I could sing. I became very well known for it all over our township and later in the country.
Significant other?
I have been married for several years to a very strong, very hard-working and financially very successful man who is admired by everyone but resents that he is not as famous as I am.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
I have difficulty connecting with the present because I am so scarred by my experience in prison, so I have trouble staying emotionally open to my husband.
Where do you live?
Up on the hill in the township, in the place where the people who make a good living have all built big houses.
Do you have any enemies?
Yes. The government. I am considered a terrorist since I was once imprisoned under the Terrorism Act.
How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place?
I love my neighborhood and I love my country. I would never leave because this is our land and these are my people. I love the rich soil, the heat and the people.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
I have four girls.
What do you do for a living?
I’m a homemaker and a political activist.
Greatest disappointment?
That my people are still not free.
Greatest source of joy?
My enduring bond with my grandmother.
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
I like having drinks and good conversations with friends and neighbors.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
My inability to keep my marriage solid. I fear we are too unhappy to last.
What keeps you awake at night?
Everything I’ve been through. I spent four years in prison, and I learned to be alert at night, so I don’t sleep well. I worry constantly about my girls, about my marriage and about the ever-present violence from the state.
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
My people are under attack, our land does not belong to us and we are not free.
Is there something that you need or want that you don’t have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
For my children I want safety. For my country I want freedom. For myself I want a simple, peaceful and happy life.
Why don’t you have it? What is in the way?
We are under occupation. I am a former political prisoner. A simple life is not available to me and neither is freedom for my people or safety for my children.
WE INHERIT THE FIRE by Kagiso Lesego Molope
A gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter—set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.
There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare . . .
In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.
Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.
Women’s Fiction [ McClelland & Stewart, On Sale: January 13, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780771019852 / ]
Buy WE INHERIT THE FIRE: Amazon.com | Kindle | BN.com | Books-A-Million | Indie BookShops | Ripped Bodice | Walmart.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Kagiso Lesego Molope
Kagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She is the author of four other novels: Dancing in the Dust, which was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006; The Mending Season; Such a Lonely, Lovely Road; and This Book Betrays My Brother. She has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award four times. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction, and the 2019 inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. Across Southern Africa and in parts of Europe, her works are read in schools in several languages. She wrote the play Maya Angelou: Black Woman Rising, which was staged for five years at Oslo’s Nordic Black Theatre. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.
No Comments
Comments are closed.