Product Review

Now available as an ebook! Read Mark Mathabane's critically acclaimed non-fiction work African Women: Three Generations.

In African Women, the author of the highly acclaimed and bestselling memoir Kaffir Boy presents the deeply moving, often shocking, but ultimately inspiring stories of his grandmother, mother and sister. Coping with abuse, gambling, drunkenness and infidelity from the men they love or have been forced to marry, all three women defy African tradition, and the poverty and violence of life in a modern urban society, to make fulfilling lives for themselves and those they love in the belly of the apartheid beast in South Africa.

"A powerful piece of work...It is a pleasure finally to have a book concerned with issues of dire importance to women written sensitively by a man." — Washington Post Book World

"The South African, nonfiction version of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale...These stories show us that women's spirits refuse to be imprisoned forever." —The Boston Globe

"What courage it took for these three black South African women to tell their stories — and to live their lives! — and for Mark Mathabane to weave their individual stories into this book." — Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University professor and author of You Just Don't Understand

"Mathabane shifts his attention from the evils of racism to what may be the still more insidious and intractable problems of sexism as he describes in spare, moving prose the lives of his sister, mother and grandmother." — The Wall Street Journal

"A finely crafted book that makes it easier to understand how the vicious cycles of abuse and oppression of women snowballed under apartheid." — Christian Science Monitor

"A deeply shocking tribute to the historical struggles, sufferings and above all, the courage of women." — Quarterly Black Review of Books

"Memoirs that speak in harrowing detail of growing up female in South Africa...There's no sloganizing; rather, the political is made personal in scenes of daily confrontation between women and men, between black and white."
— Booklist

Mark Mathabane dedicates this book "to African women who, with indomitable courage and undying faith, daily fought to sustain hope in the depths of despair and bondage."