We Belong to the Trees
A Novel

In this multi-layered debut novel, Keletso Mopai dives into the world of post-apartheid South Africa in a small town, where a devastating act of racial violence shocks the community.On a farm in Tzaneen, an Afrikaner town in Limpopo, the northernmost province of South Africa, Maluka, a young Black security guard, steps into trouble with the family for whom he works. Set against the backdrop of a post-Mandela, multi-racial South Africa in the mid-1990s, this novel follows a range of characters whose different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds inform how they contend with the fallout of the tragedy and how it ripples down a generation. We meet Maluka's younger brother Solly; the farm's matron Sunette, who suffers at the hands of her violent husband; Maluka's beloved Cola, a young spiritualist, who is pregnant with his child; and many more memorable characters. As secrets and resentments come to light, relationships are put under pressure, illuminating the complex and simmering tensions that define this community.An exquisite and wide-ranging debut, We Belong to the Trees offers an utterly original vision of post-apartheid South Africa, one that grapples with the freedom from the old apartheid realities and the yet-unrealized promised land of self-empowerment and equity the nation had long yearned for. The effects of exploitation, poverty, racism, and greed converge in a small town to tell the tale of a nation still grappling with the wounds of a violent history that is more than a recent memory.