by Malose Godfrey Nyatlo (Author)
A resident magistrate was murdered by villagers in the Eastern District of the Cape colony, South Africa in 1880. Seeking revenge, the colonial masters went after the treacherous king and his tribe. The King, his family and some of his people fled into the land of Basotho where their existence was spoken in hushed tones for more than a decade. Fearing discovery and retribution for himself and his family, he persuaded some of his children to flee inland, led by mineworkers who had come to Kimberley to work the mines in return for guns. The mineworkers came from the land of Langa, a splinter Mbo tribe which lived in the far northern part of the country. The journey up North lasted a gruelling ten days and ended at the new village of Mohlotlo, Mapela, where two of King Mhlontlo's children were to make a home.
Generations later a young woman named Mokgadi, aka Zimasa Mhlontlo, rose in the village. A woman of high moral standing, she was forced to leave home to go and live in the administrative capital of the newly-born democratic state of South Africa. Infected with the marauding HIV, fate was to put her at the forefront of the struggle against the terrible disease, earning her universal respect for her courage. Brought up in traditional and village norms, her struggle pitted her against the institutions that forged her; tradition, the church, and even the new government that liberated her from tyranny based on skin colour.