Dancing in the Dust

Kagiso Lesego Molope was born and educated in South Africa. Her first novel, Dancing in the Dust (Mawenzi House) was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006. Her second novel, The Mending Season, was chosen to be on the school curriculum in South Africa. This Book Betrays My Brother was awarded the Percy Fitzpatrick Prize by the English Academy of Southern Africa, where it was first published. Her latest novel, Such a Lonely, Lovely Road, was released in 2018. She lives in Ottawa.

Is is the turbulent 1980s in apartheid South Africa, when even ordinary life is full of danger and uncertainty. What will tomorrow bring? Tihelo, a thirteen-year-old girl, lives with her older sister Keitumetse and ther mother Kgomotso in a township outside Pretoria. Kgomotso works as a maid for a white household in the city and has to depend on the neighbours to keep an eye on the girls; one day she does not come home. Keitumetse's boyfriend is a young freedom fighter on the run from the police. And Tihelo gets drawn into the "comrades" of the local student freedom organization, risking capture and torture by the dreaded police who make daily raids on the township. Life in this brutalized South Africa holds mysteries of other sorts. What happened to the girls' father? Why is Mma Kleintjie, a partly white "coloured" woman living in the township? Why is Tihelo herself fairer than the rest of of her family?