Deliver Us From Evil | General Fiction

Johnny Masilela

Scenes from a rural Transvaal upbringing: An award-winning author recreates his youth in a tobacco-farming district in the old western Transvaal, where his father’s position as the principal of the small farm school set the family apart from the farm workers and their families.

The birth of Johannes is cause for great happiness, because for many years his mother struggled to bring a child into the world alive. Everybody on the farm is delighted, including the white farmer – to the distress of his own wife.

But soon tensions develop in Johannes’s own home: his father is a God-fearing disciplinarian whose humorless strictness drives his wife away. She moves to town in search of life’s pleasures, and Johannes is first sent to live with his granny, and later to a boarding school. However, he never completes his schooling as politics intervene and he gets expelled from school during the sixties.

Deliver us from evil captures a South African boyhood with generous humour, absorbing detail and deceptive simplicity.

With photographs from the Masilela family album.