Review by Gerhard Maré
South African Historical Journal, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2021.1895878
Published online: 19 Mar 2021

‘Reading this book will be a rich and illuminating experience on many levels. For those who are willing, it will also be a mirror for self-reflection and help others on their journey to healing and wholeness.’

Father Michael Lapsley, founder and director of the Institute for Healing of Memories
 

‘Mchunu brings a much-needed perspective to the Natal Midlands’ violence, combining first-hand experience of survival with academic examination of the gendered and spiritual activities of men and women that shaped the patch of violence. He sensitively portrays how people on both sides of the conflict understood their activities – a tremendous feat – and how they lived and live daily with the violence and its aftermaths.’

Jill E. Kelly, author of To Swim With Crocodiles: Land Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996

Review by Christopher Merrett
The Witness, 7 June 2021

Two main narratives frame the civil war that engulfed the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One, broadly supported by local human rights monitors, focuses on Inkatha as a traditionalist, patriarchal, ethnocentric movement imposing its will on the region with the tacit, and often blatant, support of the apartheid state. This aroused the opposition of youth, community and labour organisations pursuing more modernist agendas usually associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF) or independent trade unions.

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