family again for twelve years. She
lived in a hut with fourteen cousins
—fourteen children from fourteen
different mothers and fathers. All
the husbands and uncles had gone
off to the cities to find work, and
the children who weren’t wanted, or
whom no one could afford to feed,
had been sent back to the homeland
to live on this aunt’s farm.
The homelands were,
ostensibly, the original homes of
South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and
semi-sovereign “nations” where
black people would be “free.” Of
course, this was a lie. For starters,
despite the fact that black people