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“Kikuyu
is a deeply moving account of the influence of family in the making of
an identity and a novel. Its sensitive depiction of the ordinariness of
our sorrows, of the banality of our hopes and sufferings, places it
among the very finest novels produced in this country.”
The Sunday Times, South Africa
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Fabian Latsky
remembers his childhood on the holiday farm Soebatsfontein in the Karoo
– at times through the eyes of a young boy, more often with the
world-weary perspective of the writer he has become. The series of
events of the summer of 1960 changed his outlook on life irrevocably.
His mother, who yearns for the old days of the
theatre, lives for the new Season when the rondavels set on the kikuyu
lawns are bursting at their seams with visitors. It will provide an
escape from her husband’s LSD-induced hallucinations and a drab
existence where her only solace is a secret liason with Major Heathcote
MacKenzie.
Amongst the holiday guest who arrive this year
are Tant Geert, butch and worldy-wise, and her new lover, Miss Marge.
Following developments with an eagle eye, Fabian becomes aware of the
Thing – the workers call it Kikuyu – which prowls about in
the dark, biding its time. Is it the Thing which violently snatches away
the beautiful Shona girl Tsitsi? Or is it Reuben the black steward who
drifts through the guests, secretly listening, the Broederbond-uncle who
brought Tsitsi along as a helper; the Pastor who’s come to the
Moordenaarskaroo to recruit souls? Or is it perhaps the scrawny Major
with his medals and the silver bullet he’s saving for the Thing?
Kikuyu is a fascinating evocation of a
Karoo childhood through which the “winds of change” are blowing, and
it confirms Etienne van Heerden as a writer of international repute.
Kikuyu has already been published in Afrikaans by Tafelberg, and in
Dutch by Meulenhoff.
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