“The books is well recommended, readable: it teaches us about the challenges that we, African Women falls into.”
CONTAINS SPOILERS!
Thendiwe Khumalo is a young girl of age 2, living with her grandmother and her twin sister in Ladysmith. She is not married, but she quits university at a final year level. Lack of parental care turned Thandiwe into a lover of men who sometimes were her father’s age. She dedicated her life to giving pleasure to men until she could no longer control her feelings for them.
Frankly, this affection was not meant for them but for what they had their wealth. For fulfilling her carnal urges, she has an occasional fling with men, both known and unknown. Her uneventful life suddenly takes an unpredictable turn when she is brought to disgrace by her sister’s husband, August Craig with whom she was having a flitting and lustful affair.
Thandiwe is forced to flea away from home. She decides to visit start a new life, far from home, living alone in a township near Francistown, Botswana. While she is here, she discovers that she is pregnant with August’s baby.
Within weeks, Thandiwe becomes inexorably mixed up with her own affairs in the small township. Thandiwe is kicked out of the hotel she lived in because she could not pay. Two evenings after, she is gang robbed by 3 natives out of communal hatred, her life is ravaged and she has no place to go. Likely, Timothy saves her: Timothy is a man (not old enough to be her grandfather) who is living alone at his farm in rural Francistown. She tells Timothy about her pregnancy, but then, Thandiwe’s life continues becoming a mess when Timothy forces himself on her.
Within days, Thandiwe disappears, then meet a conventional healer who peforms a ritual on Thandiwe’s unborn child, for
Thandiwe to become rich. But the healer dies in no time before they complete the ceremony. Days after the incident, she meets a rich man whom she takes pleasure on. She decides to move in and starts living with him in his modern expensive house in Gaborone.
As she lives with him, his company starts boring her, though he offers her everything that she wants. After few moths, the boyfriend dies, and the mother of him tells Thandiwe the truth about Thandiwe’s real parents. It appears that her grandmother is not a real grandmother to her; but she is a mother, and there is a reason behind why she kept the truth away from Thandiwe and her sister. When she returns to South Africa and demands the truth, the grandmother confesses and takes her life away.
The author then narrates a complex story of facing, and responding to Temptations – by Thandiwe, both in South Arica and Botswana.
Writing Style:
Rapula uses the direct narrative form where Thandiwe depicts the sequence of events in hercife. The language is straightforward, prosaic and conversational. The book is very easy to read for most.
My Thoughts:
This book profoundly impressed me. The author is very sensitive to his subject and is able to keep his message on point. It is interesting to see how Thandiwe, and Catherine, her grandmother, react to ‘Temptations’.
Applause to Leon, he has brought to focus what affects societies without caution. The author tells us how Temptations takes on various connotations in different societies, in various professions, in various age groups.
Reviewed by:
Veronica Tyree
Added 25th December 2018
CONTAINS SPOILERS!
Temptations is the story of Thandiwe Khumalo, a girl living with her twin sister and her grandmother in Lady Smith, Kwa-Zulu natal, in South Africa. The first chapter of the novel claims that: “Thandiwe grew up in the absence of her parents. She and her twin sister were raised by their grandmother.
Lack of parental care turned Thandiwe into a lover of men who sometimes were her father’s age. She dedicated her life to giving pleasure to men until she could no longer control her feelings for them. Frankly, this affection was not meant for them but for what they had; their wealth.”
In fact, money has become a big problem for her, and is about to get much bigger.
When the book opens THandiwe gets her satisfaction from weekend visits from Terry, a man she knows as her only boyfriend, but it’s an arrangement that soon falls apart when she finds that Terry is a married man. Thandiwe, however can’t accept it: she does not wish to stop falling for men with rich background.
She even goes so far as falling for August Craig, her sister’s husband, but ultimately backs off when she is found by Catherine, and Thandeka (Grandmother and the twin sister) sleeping with August.
Thandiwe flees to Botswana and finds herself in the presence of three hoodlums who come and rob her after she was kicked out of the shanty hotel she was living in; she was kicked because she didn’t have money to pay for living there.
She later flees and live with Timothy, who has a plot of land in the countryside and lives alone. While living with him, she discovers that she is pregnant with August’s baby. A second disgrace, after offering Thandiwe everything she wanted (buy her expensive perfumes, clothes, makeup) he ends up raping her.
She also fleas away from Timothy and meets a rich man who also gives her everything. But she is not satisfied, but then, before she plans her next move, she discovers something about her parents. She discovers that the woman who raised her is not a grandmother, but a mother. When she returns home, there is a shocking news that she gets before her grandmother kills herself.
The books is well recommended, readable: it teaches us about the challenges that we, African Women falls into.
Reviewed by:
Lilian John
Added 19th December 2018
