American Author Eve Fairbanks Speaks In Soweto
If you have always wondered what the book, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of a Brave and Bewildered Nation, is all about, then your opportunity to pose questions directly to the author has literally landed on your stoep.
Author Eve Fairbanks will be at the Soweto Book Café, 1023 Mafumbu Street Zondi 1, on Saturday, 6 May. She will be chatting with Daily Maverick scribe Sipho Hlongwane about the book, which is set in South Africa, Meadowlands to be precise.
The book was published in the US last year and it has just been published in South Africa by Jonathan Ball. A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors tells the stories of three ordinary South Africans, trailing their journeys in a country still finding its footing after yanking the yoke of apartheid and white supremacy.
“The Inheritors is a story of three people – Christo, Dipuo, and her daughter Malaika – living through a time in South Africa that both afforded massive change and that often feels totally stuck, not moving fast enough,” said Eve. “Dipuo and Christo were born around 1970, and they were teens both fighting apartheid on different sides – Dipuo as an activist in Meadowlands and Christo as one of the last white men drafted to fight for the apartheid military. In 1992, on her twentieth birthday, Dipuo gave birth to Malaika. Actually, Malaika’s given name was Lesego, but when she was about four, she told Dipuo she wanted a different name. Dipuo told me she went to the requisite government office to change it because “I respected her.” That encapsulated a lot of the hopes around the “born free” generation–that they would have unprecedented opportunities to choose their lives or make them from scratch. These are the three main characters. I worked with them for many years, and I tried to portray them as seriously and intensively as journalists often portray a famous politician or musician. Because so many more people deserve that depth of portrayal.”
The book has been shortlisted for the PEN America Literary awards (non-fiction) and one of the Washington Post’s 50 most notable works of non-fiction for 2022.
“I’m a writer who’s been living in South Africa since 2009,” said Eve. “I left Washington D.C. to move to Cape Town, then Bloemfontein, then Thohoyandou, then Johannesburg after spending three years as a journalist covering the U.S. presidential campaigns for a political magazine.”
“I’ve been told this book reads like a novel, and I think anybody who loves Dudu Busani-Dube or Tsitsi Dangarembga or even Deon Meyer might love it. It has some tough material, as adults’ lives do, but anybody 16+ can read it. It took many years in part because that’s how long it takes to gather a fiction-like level of detail and intimacy with people who are real, rather than imagined. I also hope it’s a book for people trying to make sense of South Africa’s contemporary political problems and how those show up in their own electricity-less, often frustrating but also glorious lives. It really talks about what real people wanted out of 1994, the sometimes conflicting things they hoped for, and what they really want right now. It talks a lot about power, and why in South Africa, power can corrupt. And also, the people currently in charge of the government are “ordinary people,” too–they were forged in the same crucible as the book’s three main characters.”
The event will commence at 1pm, at Soweto Book Cafe. To RSVP, email mazibuko.thami@yahoo.com
PUBLISH'D AFRIKA 