Title: The Scattering
Author: Lauri Kubuitsile
Genre: Novel
Publisher: Namibia Scientific Society / Kuiseb Publishers
2nd edition. Windhoek, Namibia 2023
ISBN 9789994576913 / ISBN 978-99945-76-91-3
Softcover, 12 x 19 cm, 344 pages
The Scattering is moving novel describing 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, Lauri Kubuitsile writes of Herero woman Tjipuka, 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 marries and has a child with the love of her life. Thinking German soldiers have killed her husband in the uprising, she flees with her son into the Omaheke semi-desert, is captured and put to work around the prison camp in Lüderitz.
There Tjipuka has to find the courage and the will to survive against all odds. The Transvaal, 1899: Riette’s nursing ambitions are crushed when she is forced into marriage with an older neighbor. When he, a boer commando fighter, is taken captive and their farm is set ablaze during the Second Anglo-Boer War by the enemy, she and his daughters must face the horrors of the British concentration camps. Against the backdrop of southern Africa’s colonial wars at the dawn of the twentieth century, The Scattering traces the fates of two remarkable women whose paths cross after each has suffered the devastation and dislocation of war.
Lauri Kubuitsile, a former newspaper publisher, is the author of over 20 works of African fiction for children and adults. Six of her books for children are prescribed reading in schools in Botswana and South Africa. She was the 2007 winner of the BTA/Anglo Platinum Short Story Competition and the recipient of the Botswana Ministry of Youth and Culture’s Orange Botswerere Award for Creative Writing in the same year. She has twice won the Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing and was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize. Lauri Kubuitsile lives in Botswana.
