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Lauri Kubuitsile
Lauri Kubuitsile is the author of many works of fiction for children and adults, including the short-story collection In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata and Other Stories. She was the 2007 winner of the BTA/Anglo Platinum Short Story Competition and the recipient of the Botswana Ministry of Youth and Culture’s Orange Botswerere Award for Creative Writing in the same year.
She has twice won the Golden Baobab Prize for children’s writing and was shortlisted for the 2011 Caine Prize.
She lives in Botswana.
Books
The Scattering
A Novel
by Lauri Kubuitsile
244 pages • 2023 • ISBN 978-99945-76-91-3 • 120 x 190mm • Namibia Scientific Society/Kuiseb Publishers
South-West Africa, 1904: When General Lothar von Trotha, the commander of the German colonial forces, issues an extermination order against the Herero people, they are forced to flee into the desert and seek safety in British Bechuanaland. Tjipuka, a young Herero mother, escapes the massacre with her baby, but is captured and put to work in the death camps in Lüderitz. There she has to find the courage – and the will – to survive against all odds.
The Transvaal, 1899: Riette’s nursing ambitions are crushed when she is forced into marriage with an older neighbour. When he is taken captive and their farm is set ablaze during the Second Anglo-Boer War, she and his daughters must face the horrors of the British concentration camps.
Against the backdrop of southern Africa’s colonial wars at the dawn of the twentieth century, The Scattering traces the fates of two remarkable women whose paths cross after each has suffered the devastation and dislocation of war.
Moving and intimate, Kubuitsile’s novel provides a fascinating glimpse into the indomitability of the human spirit.