MATHABANE

MATHABANE.COM

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

WHERE MARK HAS LECTURED

Businesses & Other Organizations:
BellSouth
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UBUNTU

DUST-JACKET

Makhado — the African warrior whose inflexible sense of justice is severely tested when he learns the bitter truth about his beloved son.

Liefling — the Afrikaner human rights lawyer whose loyalty to her martyred activist father leads her to risk everything — including her long suffering mother' s love — in order to help black families whose loved ones were killed by apartheid-era death squads.

Kruger — the unrepentant believer in Baaskap (white supremacy) who will stop at nothing to realize his dream of an Afrikaner-only homeland -- even if it means igniting a race war.

Thando — the former guerilla leader struggling to uplift her impoverished community even as she is tortured by guilt over having ordered the execution of the brother of the man she loves.

Gideon — the schoolteacher who seeks redemption for a dark secret by risking his life to expose one of apartheid' s most ruthless death squad.

Freda — the disillusioned verligte (liberal) torn between love for her daughter and for the man who wants to kill that daughter.

Shaka — the askari (double agent) and assassin bent on revenge against those who destroyed his soul.

David — the Jewish lawyer who' s chosen to live in a dangerous ghetto as he searches for those who tortured and murdered his activist black girlfriend.

These are among the memorable characters in Mark Mathabane' s electrifying thriller set in the new South Africa. Using as background the controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Mathabane — as he did in Kaffir Boy, his best-selling memoir about growing up under apartheid — makes the political and racial intensely human and gripping.

In Ubuntu, Mathabane' s formidable skills as a storyteller are at their best. He' s painted an utterly convincing picture of a vibrant and turbulent post-apartheid South Africa — from the explosive opening scene of a carjacking in downtown Johannesburg to the heart-stopping final scene of a chase through a spooky jungle in the Venda homeland.

The credibility of Ubuntu' s plot and characters illuminates better than any history book or newspaper headline the corrupting evil of apartheid, the atrocities committed by ruthless death squads in its defense, and the heroism of many of its victims, black and white, sung and unsung.

Black power salutes from some of the children who were orphaned by death squad violence in Alexandra.

A tour-de-force adventure and love story that will leave you breathless with its many twists, Ubuntu combines fact and fiction in a way that informs and inspires even as it entertains with its page-turning suspense. Ubuntu is a powerful and unforgettable saga of divided loyalties, deadly treachery, forbidden love, unspeakable horrors, and the heroic courage of individual South Africans who dare to reach across a deep racial divide to save their country' s soul by bringing to justice one of the apartheid era' s most ruthless killers.

Mark Mathabane was born and raised in the ghetto of Alexandra in South Africa. His previous books include Kaffir Boy, Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White (which he co-authored with his wife Gail) and African Women: Three Generations. He lectures extensively on high school and college campuses and his articles on South Africa, race relations, culture and education have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report and many other publications. He lives with his family in North Carolina, where he' s currently working on another thriller.

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Libraries
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