«The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena» by Elsa Joubert

Voted one of the hundred most important books published in Africa during the last century. Winner of the WA Hofmeyr Prize, the CNA Literary Award and the Louis Luyt Prize.Sharing the language and religion or the Afrikaners bent on her people's subjugation, Poppie Nongena – a Xhosa woman born in an Upington township – has no choice but to negotiate the riptide of structural violence that is apartheid South Africa. Rootless, her ailing husband emasculated by legislation and her children bearing witness to her degradation, Poppie is forced on a spiritual and cultural journey from Lambert's Bay to a Cape Town township to Mdantsane in the Eastern Cape. Her heartache is the pain of a nation – an emblem of how the human spirit may strain under the weight of tyranny, yet adapts and prevails.Written to break the barrier of ignorance in late-1970s South Africa, The Long, Journey of Poppie Nongena – unsentimental but sensitive – documents a harrowing life lived in a time that a country would rather forget. A literary and commercial success when it was released in Afrikaans in 1979, Elsa Joubert's searing indictment of inhumanity remains universally relevant almost 40 years later in a world in which political dispensations continue to rise and fall. It has won a clutch of literary prizes, including the CNA and Hofmeyr, and has been translated into 13 languages and sold around the world. In 2002 it was selected by a panel of 16 international academi and writers as one of the 100 best African novels of the 20th century.