We Belong to the Trees

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.