Join for the launch of Kagiso Lesego Molope‘s We Inherit the Fire , a gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter—set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.
BOOK LAUNCH DETAILS
1/12/2026
Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4
About the Author:
Kagiso Lesego Molope is an award-winning Indigenous South African storyteller and playwright. She is the author of four novels for young adults: Dancing in the Dust, which was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006; The Mending Season; Such a Lonely, Lovely Road; and This Book Betrays My Brother. She has been three times nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award, and the 2019 Inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. Her works are read in schools in parts of Europe. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin Anishinaabe territory.
About the Book:
A gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter—set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.
There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare . . .
In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.
Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.
