DAS EDITIONS – förlag

In this compelling memoir of growing up different, Ijoma Mangold, today one of Germany's best literary critics, remembers his youth in 1970s Heidelberg and the new Federal Republic, and momentous visits in early adulthood to the USA and Nigeria.His own story is inextricably linked with that of his mother, a German from the eastern province of Silesia, forced to escape as a refugee in the expulsions from 1944, and to start afresh in utter poverty in West Germany. His Nigerian father came to Germany to train in pediatric surgery but returned before Ijoma was old enough to remember him. His reappearance on the scene forces a crash collision with an unknown culture, one he grew up suspicious of, and a new complex family history to come to terms with. Mangold explores many existential questions in this lively narrative; How does a boy cope with an absent father? What was it like to grow up 'bi-racial' in the Federal Republic? Was he an opportunist, a master adaptor who had over-assimilated? What is the relationship between race and class? And what is more unusual in Germany: having dark skin or a passion for Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner? Ijoma shares his story with its dramatic twists and turns, not forgetting the surprises he uncovers about himself along the way.

"I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros... Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people."South-West Africa, 1904: When General Lothar von Trotha, military commander of the German colonial forces, issues the extermination order, the Herero people are forced to flee into the desert, seeking safety in British Bechuanaland. Tjipuka, a young Herero mother, escapes the massacre with her baby but is later captured and sent to work in the death camps of Luderitz. There, she must find the courage - and the will - to survive against all odds.The Transvaal, 1899: Riette's nursing ambitions are crushed when she is forced into marriage with an older neighbour. When he is taken captive and their farm is set ablaze under Britain's scorched-earth policy, she and his daughters must endure the horrors of the British concentration camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War.Against the backdrop of two of southern Africa's most brutal colonial wars at the dawn of the twentieth century, The Scattering traces the fates of two remarkable women whose paths cross after each has suffered the devastation and dislocation of war. A haunting and deeply moving historical novel, Kubuitsile weaves an unforgettable tale of loss, resilience and a powerful reminder of history's forgotten atrocities.