TOLAH Book Club: Endings & Beginnings: A Story of Healing by Redi Tlhabi

A book about a complicated relationship between a tweeny and a notorious gangster. She was just a child he saw as a person that needed protection and he was a young man misunderstood by the very community he had grown up in. The hard hearts of the very people that were supposed to be his protectors led him to become a rebellious killer and rapist in order to be taken seriously, yet left him with enough humanity to be so gentle and loving to little Redi in want for nothing in return for protecting her in the harsh streets of apartheid South Africa. Theirs was a strange union yet they both knew they belonged in each other's company in the way that they jelled.

As the book takes you through their brother and sisterly relationship that most believed to be a sexual and sickly one, you get to understand the reasons why the streets that shaped him became the monster that swallowed him. You get to see the confusion that this relationship brews inside the mind of a young child that was Redi. To see the other side of a Gangster without going the remourseful route yet can connect with what a lot of us could refuse to relate to on a normal day when confronted with giving a tsotsi time of day.

So as it were, after the death of Mabegzo, the gangster in Redi's life. She takes it upon herself to go on a journey to help understand this young man that had been her first crush. The journey that reveals the reasons he was who he was to the world. Despite the fact that Mabegzo's name brought out memories they would rather get over, Redi pushed for answers, knocked on doors and put on her journalistic hat on. If not for herself as it turned out, but for his family. 

I was captured by this novel to a point of tears, especially when Mabegzo goes into hiding with no food and she had to provide for him by sharing his lunchbox. I felt like kicking someone when she managed to make him go to church just to have a mmamoruti chase him out of the Lord's house.

It is such a beautiful story, although I do wish Redi could have declared the real reason for wanting to find the truth about him which I think is because she loved him dearly since he was her first love.

by Queen Troll