FernFolio

After her mother’s death from AIDS, sixteen year-old Chanda Kabelo struggles to bring up her six year-old sister, Iris, and her five year-old brother, Solly. Though her former high school teacher, Mr. Selalame, has helped her get a supply teaching job at the local elementary school, her neighbours, the gossipy and overly intrusive yet well-meaning, Mrs. Tafa, and the kindly Mr. and Mrs. Lesoles, keep a close eye on Chanda and her siblings, and her best friend, Esther, is steadfastly supportive, Chanda is exhausted and overwhelmed by the worry and responsibility of looking after her family.
Her recurring nightmares about her mother, Iris and Solly, Tiro, her mother’s village, and rivers of blood so trouble Chanda, that she talks to Mr. Selalame, Esther and Mrs. Tafa about them. Their reasons differ, but all of her friends tell Chanda that she must travel with her brother and sister to Tiro and mend the family rift that occurred when her mother fled from an arranged marriage to Tuelo Malunga, a man whom she knew was physically abusive, and married their father instead. So Chanda, Iris and Solly make the long bus trip north from their home in Bonang to the village of Tiro where they are warmly welcomed by their grandparents, Auntie Lizbet, and their two uncles and families.
At first, Chanda enjoys her holiday from worry and responsibility, getting to know and like her mother’s family and watching with pleasure as Iris and Solly make friends among the village children and bask in the attention of so many adults. She is intrigued by Nelson, the seventeen year-old son of her grandparents’ neighbours, but worries when she starts to see signs that both his father and older brothers are physically violent toward women and children. When it abruptly becomes clear that her family expects her to marry Nelson, and that he is the son of the man her mother fled from twenty years earlier, Chanda refuses to do as her mother’s family expects, and brings shame on them when she accuses Nelson’s brothers of beating up their wives.
Determined to return to their home in Bonang as soon as possible, Chanda packs up her siblings and heads to the bus station, only to find that the highways have been closed because Mandiki, a rebel leader from Ngala, to the north, has slipped across the border with a small band of men and is striking small posts and villages, stealing food, weapons and drugs, and torturing and killing any who happen to stand in his way. But more frightening still, Mandiki is looking for young children to kidnap and recruit into his rebel army.
When Iris and Solly are stolen by the rebels, along with Pako, Nelson’s little brother, Chanda and Nelson form an uneasy truce and join forces to track the children and their captors north in a desperate bid to free them.
A sequel to Chanda’s Secrets, Chanda’s Wars is a wonderful story about a young African girl’s struggle to care for her young siblings while clinging to her own dream of further education in the midst of the AIDS epidemic and against a backdrop of war and its destructive forces. Allan Stratton’s writing is sure, his deft descriptions and insights into human nature bring Chanda’s Wars leaping off the page and into the hearts of his readers. Not to be missed!
FernFolio Editor