J.J MOILOA's TSIETSI E LATELLA TSHOTLEHO

Tsietsi e latella tshotleho. By J.J MOILOA
Book: Tsietsi e latella tshotleho
Author: J.J Moiloa
Review by Rebaone Motsalane

What I love to hate about experienced and gifted writers is their ability to grab my attention until the end of the book, though sometimes it requires a lot of patience to do so.

I had to read until page 53 to get to the essence of the story and only then the plot of the story was revealed. I was half-way through and about to finish and still not sure about the storyline.

The story picks up very slowly and the only thing that kept my attention is the background of the writer as he is highly esteemed and respected.

At the end, my curiosity paid off and over-powered the frustration of trying to figure the storyline out. It was beautifully written and revealed.

The book is about a man who clearly is not in his right mind and highly agitated. However at the beginning the story is not clear about the cause and his motives. He has a plan which the reader is not clear about, whether it is to rob a mine or something else. At the beginning I thought he was there to enrich himself, only to find out that he was there to avenge his wife’s rape which resulted in a son that he hated so much.

He lays a trap to stage an incident and blow up the culprit and to finally put matters to rest and go back home. True, the accident happened where not only his enemy got injured, but two other innocent men who knew nothing about the hatred between the two.

When they all thought that they will never be rescued, he confessed to his friend how he stole explosives to cause the accident and apologises to his friend. He takes the blame and at the same time relives his pain and suffering that got him there; he unloads his frustrations.

However, a sting remains in the tail…

AWOONOR'S "COMES THE VOYAGER AT LAST"

The author, Kofi Awoonor, educated in Ghana, London, and New York, is a well known long-established African writer. This, his second novel, is an interesting travel narrative that combines African and African American history (the forced removal of West Africans to the New World) with myth. The story unfolds in the mind of its central character, an African American who can trace his ancestry to slavery and the Civil War, as he returns to West Africa for a spiritual reunion with the people. This main narrative is juxtaposed with an italicized account of West Africans being led to a slave ship more than 300 years earlier. This book reads as one Ghanaian's version of Alex Haley's African American family saga Roots…