Book title: We Inherit the Fire
Author: Kagiso Lesego Molope
2026, Penguin, Random House, Canada, 336 pages.
Review by Ifeoma Chinwuba:
We Inherit the Fire is a Love at first page book. The evocative opening lines draw you in.
My mother: standing in front of a soldier…her finger pointing between his eyes… The soldier in army khaki…has an AK-47…
On her back, an infant wrapped in a white summer blanket.
P. 9.
The novel is a good read for the long winter months of far niente, though its subject matter is sublime, belonging to the genre of protest literature, this time against the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is also a memoir, a joint memoir because the narrator changes from daughter to mother. The plural pronoun in the title, We, is a pointer to this joint venture. The reader weaves through the experiences of these amazons who have fought racism in the hotel, restaurant, school bus, prison, school and in the streets.
Their people are landowners fighting for things to stay that way: them having land to farm, us staying far, far away from them P. 217
The novel remarkably dwells almost solely on the signal role of different generations of women-sisters, mothers, aunts, grannies- involved in the freedom struggle. The role of Black men is glossed over, to the chagrin of the lone man of the house (at times husband, father, in-law, depending on the narrator), whose primary focus appears to be his business dealings.
That house of ours, always being filled with women. People could barely tell us apart sometimes. P. 298
The book is reminiscent of The Promise (Damon Galgut. 2021), also set in the crumbling days of apartheid, a period of transition when the vestiges of the segregation and discrimination policy are propped up by die-hard Boers. But the women in Molope’s work are there to dismantle this system. They have learnt this by mimesis and by blood:
I have inherited my mother’s mind: the fire, the fury, the weight of the country’s past. P.334
There is fire in every one of our babies. P. 300.
Style-wise, the narration is in stream-of-consciousness, wending from one event to another, as if tumbling from memory in a haphazard manner. The minutiae of the thought processes of the characters are well portrayed and are resonant of Maria Ndiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes.
The author’s descriptions are picturesque;
She reverses the car with the speed of someone fleeing a crime scene. P. 12.
…they move with the speed of people about to miss their train. P. 13.
Hellven, a new word describes the mixed feeling of going shopping; the mall is like heaven, but the parking experience is like hell. There is a painstaking effort to capture the totality of the moment, the physical attributes of the personages, their thought processes as well as the outside canvas.
However, this novel does not respect the rules of prose as we know them. The narration suffers from a multiple personality disorder. One episode is recounted over and over by different persons, without warning. Sometimes the same person revisits, regurgitates a past episode, like the proverbial undigested breakfast. The reader has to circle back to ascertain the narrator. Is it Kelelo? Or Dolly (Malaka? Melodi?) Many editors, gate-keepers of the publishing world would frown at the swift switches of the POV. Minus the repetitions, the book would be shorter.
In addition, some would criticize the absence of quotation marks to signpost dialogues.
Moreover, editors there are, wont to shun novels of more than two hundred pages, citing cost of ink, paper, etc. The author does not pay heed. She has a story to tell, and tell it she must, in all her words.
Is this part of Molope’s protest? Not only against the apartheid system that restricts and regulates non-Whites in her country of origin, but also against the rules that strait-jacket the creative spirit. The fire that she inherits is all consuming, razing rules that hold all people – including artists- down.
© Ifeoma Chinwuba, 2026.
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