Soweto, my love

After going through the "tougher than Spartan" circumcision ritual, Ramusi, the orphan son of an illiterate tribesman, worked his way up from herdboy and house servant to a graduate in anthropology from Northwestern University in Illinois and a career as an activist lawyer in South Africa. Along with this dramatic account of his richly varied experiences, he describes the aches, agonies, pains and cries, as well as the hope and courage, of his compatriots who are humiliated and terrorized by apartheid system that he, his family and associates have been opposing for most of their lives. One of his sons was murdered by the South African police, and Ramusi himself had to spend eight years in exile in America. In the end, he has become convinced that if change cannot be attained peacefully, it must be achieved by violence, since South Africa's rulers, "relying on their weapons and on their Bibles to protect them," silence the press, increase their repression and continue their reign of terror. (From Publishers Weekly, 1988).