Book description
At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of
South Africa's Eastern Cape lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few
hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is
inconceivably poor. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny
Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a
battle to survive the ravages of the greatest plague of our times, the
African AIDS epidemic.
He befriends Sizwe, a young local man who refuses to be tested for
AIDS despite the existence of a well-run testing and anti-retroviral
programme. It is Sizwe's deep ambivalence, rooted in his deep sense of
the cultural divide, that becomes the key to understanding the
dynamics that thread their way through a terrified community.
As Steinberg grapples to get closer to finding answers that remain
just out of reach, he realizes that he must look within himself to
unlock the paradoxes at the heart of his country.
Jonny Steinberg
was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of critically
acclaimed
Three Letter Plague
, published by Vintage,
Little Liberia
,
Midlands
and
The Number,
which both won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary award and the
Sunday Times
Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was educated at Wits University in
Johannesburg, and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
He has worked as a journalist on a national daily, written scripts for
television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African
government on criminal justice policy.
