Wrong Foundation of Love

Before Still Haven existed, there was another book. It is not about stillness or reflection. It is about a woman who was not allowed to speak for sixteen years.

How it began

A short trip to South Africa in 2006 ended differently than planned. What was meant to be a holiday became almost four years of charity work. In August 2008 I met Janet Thulisile Hlophe.

She told her story in pieces, hour after hour, for two years. Sometimes half an evening about a single day. My work was to listen and to write down what she said — no prettier, no smoother.

What is in it

Janet was born in 1964 into a Zulu family in rural KwaZulu-Natal. A house with no running water, in a culture where an older person is always right and a young woman is there to serve the men.

She was married against her will. For sixteen years her husband decided where she could go, who she could look at, whether she could speak. The children suffered too.

The book tells those years without adding anything to them, and everything that came after: the day the police finally took him away, the long recovery, and the work she found — going door to door, first for the Red Cross, later for the Salvation Army.

Why it is back

The book was published in 2010 by a publisher in New York. That publisher no longer exists, the rights came back, and for years the book could not be bought anywhere.

Janet has given her consent for this edition. There is a new cover, four passages that came from other sources at the time have been rewritten in our own words, and a few factual errors about the history of apartheid have been corrected. Nothing in her story has been changed.

Janet today

She lives in Umgababa, on the coast south of Durban, with her children.