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Mess, also known as Mellow Yellow, is a street kid with only one
desire: he wants to learn how to read. Because then he might be
able to discover what secrets his precious green paper holds. The
green paper is his most treasured possession. The Old Couple, who
looked after him when he was still very small, told him to keep the
paper safe until his mother came to fetch him. It has been many
years now since they were forced to take him to the horrible Bean
Man, and since he escaped from the Bean Man and went to live on the
streets with the Cement-Mixers, but through all those years he has
kept the paper safe in a flat tobacco tin next to his heart ... A
wonderfully upbeat story about a street boy's experience on the
streets as part of an alternative (that is, clean-living)
streetgang, and how he in the end manages to find his mother.
Tommy, the newcomer at Colliery Primary, wears a balaclava to
school every day. Why? What could possibly be underneath? A
terrible scar? Some alien life form? Dumisani and Doogle, aka the
Doo Dudes and best friends in the world, are determined to find
out. Whatever it takes. This school edition of Balaclava Boy is
included in the Department of Basic Educations National Catalogue
for Senior Phase learners. It has been revised and updated with
activities for pre-reading and post-reading, questions according to
cognitive levels, glossaries and notes on the genre of the novel.
Memoranda available online at www.tafelberg.com.
Thoughtful, insightful and compelling, Granite is a well-executed
imagining of what happened to cause the collapse of the
civilisation of Great Zimbabwe (called Zimba Remabwe in the book).
While adult historical fiction has experienced a recent resurgence
in interest, narratives are mostly drawn from European history;
Granite is refreshingly African, illuminating a relatively
unexplored area in fiction. It also shifts “fictionalised history”
away from the European centre: in the story, Zimba Remabwe exists
as a sophisticated African city state well integrated with the rest
of the mid-fifteenth-century world. It is a world in which Arab
scholars travel from China and India to Europe and Britain, filing
their chronicles in the revered library of Timbuktu. The narrative
method is worth noting: because he cannot write, the story is
dictated by a young nobleman called Mokomba – one of few survivors
of his city’s downfall. The penman is Shafiq, a learned Arab
traveller who is a father figure after the passing of Mokomba’s own
father. Each chapter relates a series of events from these two
characters’ perspectives, as they fill in what the other might have
glossed over. The result is a finely rendered narrative of two
distinct voices.
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