Smouldering Charcoal
SynopsisPlot
This powerful first novel chronicles the lives of two families: the first, poor, working-class and ill-educated, is compared to a young politically aware college student and her journalist fiance. The middle-class pair--idealistic and increasingly active in opposing the repressive post-colonial regime under which they all live--become victims of the same brutal violence delivered to the poor and powerless of their country.
Story
About this book
Smouldering Charcoal is Tiyambe Zeleza's first novel, set in a post-colonial African country living under an authoritarian regime. The story follows two families whose lives run along very different tracks. One family is poor, working-class, and lacking formal education. The other pair, a politically conscious college student and her journalist fiance, belong to the middle class and hold firm ideas about justice and civic freedom. Their paths converge as the novel measures how repression touches people at every level of society.
The young couple's growing opposition to the regime places them in direct conflict with the state. Zeleza uses their activism to explore a central tension: whether education and political awareness offer any real protection against a government willing to use violence against its own citizens. The answer the novel pursues is bleak. The same brutality directed at the poor and powerless reaches the middle-class pair as well, collapsing the distance between the two households.
Zeleza, a Malawian-born writer and scholar, grounds the novel in the everyday textures of life under dictatorship, from economic hardship to the slow erosion of trust between neighbours. The book was published as part of the Heinemann African Writers Series.
