Reclaiming Home

Reclaiming Home is the diary of Lesego Malepe's travels in South Africa in 2004, the 10th anniversary of South Africa's democracy. The book begins with Malepe taking the bus from Pretoria, where she grew up, to Cape Town, where she visits Robben Island—the prison where her brother served a life sentence during apartheid days. She interrupts her travels to return to Pretoria, where she attends the ceremony marking the official settlement of land claims for her parents' property and her grandmother's property in Kilnerton, Pretoria, which were confiscated by the apartheid government when Malepe was four, forcing her family—along with the rest of their community—to move to Mamelodi township for Africans. Over the course of her travels, Malepe traverses much of her home country, visiting locales including Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Thohoyandou, the University of Venda, and Giyani. Ultimately, hers is a sprawling, revealing journey that illuminates the ways South Africa has changed—and the ways it has remained the same—since the end of apartheid.

Lesego Malepe left apartheid South Africa with a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US in 1978. After completing her graduate work in political science at Boston University, she taught political science at a college near Boston for many years. She is the author of the novel Matters of Life and Death, published in 2005, about the family of a high school student who was sentenced to life on Robben Island in 1963. She has also contributed op-ed articles to national newspapers, including USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Malepe has served for many years as a judge for the Children's Africana Book Awards of the Outreach Council of the African Studies Association, and leads workshops for teachers about how to teach about Africa in general and how to use African literature in the classroom.