Novel
Blanket Boy's Moon
Synopsis
Monare, a young man from Basutoland, leaves his village for Johannesburg and its mines. There he discovers the vulnerability and exploitation of migrant workers, overcrowded housing, gangs of tsotsis, the bonds that form between men, and a police state that leads him as far as prison. Back in his homeland, he finds himself caught up in a ritual murder, a liretlo, in which people are killed so that parts of the body can be taken, and he has to flee, once again tossed between the mountains of his country and the city.
Context
Mopeli-Paulus wrote the manuscript; Peter Lanham reworked it extensively, and the book appeared in London from Collins in 1953, with a print run of forty-seven thousand copies in the United Kingdom; critics have since questioned the share of each. It was translated into Dutch, Danish, French, German, Swedish, Hebrew and Italian, and published as a serial in Swahili. Piniel Viriri Shava and Lesole Kolobe see in it, twenty-eight years after Chaka, a return to the motif of the journey, close to Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country.
Who it is for
A novel in English, easy to read; the French translation appeared the same year from Presses de la Cité.
Prizes and reception
It was an international success from its publication, printed in tens of thousands of copies.
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