Little Suns
SynopsisPlot
It is 1903. A lame and frail Malangana - 'Little Suns' - searches for his beloved Mthwakazi after many lonely years spent in Lesotho. Mthwakazi was the young woman he had fallen in love with twenty years earlier, before the assassination of Hamilton Hope ripped the two of them apart. Intertwined with Malangana's story, is the account of Hope - a colonial magistrate who, in the late nineteenth century, was undermining the local kingdoms of the eastern Cape in order to bring them under the control of the British. It was he who wanted to coerce Malangana's king and his people, the amaMpondomise, into joining his battle - a scheme Malangana's conscience could not allow.
Story
About this book
The year is 1903, and a physically weakened man named Malangana, known as Little Suns, is searching for a woman called Mthwakazi. They fell in love two decades earlier, but their lives were torn apart by events surrounding the assassination of Hamilton Hope, a British colonial magistrate stationed in the eastern Cape. Malangana has spent long years in exile in Lesotho, and now he sets out to find the person he lost.
The novel moves between two timelines. In the late nineteenth century, Hope worked to bring the local kingdoms of the eastern Cape under British control. Among those he pressured were the amaMpondomise, the people of Malangana's king. Hope attempted to coerce them into supporting his schemes, and Malangana found himself unable to comply. The consequences of that refusal shaped everything that followed, separating Malangana from Mthwakazi and driving him into exile.
Zakes Mda builds the story around documented historical events, placing invented characters alongside real ones. The structure alternates between Malangana's search in 1903 and the political tensions of the 1880s, connecting personal loss to the broader pressures of colonial expansion in southern Africa. Lesotho and the eastern Cape provide the geographic frame for both timelines.
