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Book Details
Kalahari Passage: Koba book 2
Koba and Mannie have been in jail. Their crime, loving each other across the Apartheid colour bar in southern Africa. Koba escapes her captors and using her bush skills, finds her way across the semi-desert to her former tribal home. But adapting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after a decade away, has challenges. And her mortal enemy is on her trail.
Meanwhile Mannie absconds during his parole and sets off on a sub-continental road trip to find his beloved Koba. But will his new comrades persuade him to join them across the border for training in deadly guerrilla warfare? And what will that mean for his future with Koba?
Under tragic circumstances, the lovers meet, but the danger they are in means they face heart-breaking choices.
Kalahari Passage is an action-packed story of a search for identity and love. Readers will be spellbound by Koba’s world where an ancient culture dances, trances, and lives in harmony with the land.
Key ideas
- Unique FMC from world’s oldest living culture, largely unknown outside anthropology. The lineage of Koba’s people goes back to the dawn of humankind.
- Dispossession – ancestral land, cultural identity, freedom
- Interracial love – romantic and family
- Racial discrimination and defiance
- Recent black history – Apartheid South Africa 1960s
Extract intro
Enroute back to her forgotten homeland in a remote part of Africa, Koba, a Bushman girl, has been captured by her mortal enemy, André Marais. He blames her for the death of his father from a poisoned arrow. He has already killed her mother and father.
Extract
Koba lay in the back of André’s truck, bound hand and foot, a gag in her mouth. She recalled her captor’s haste when the |’Hun[1] policeman handed her over.
‘Wait a bit … the handcuffs,’ the policeman had said. ‘You can’t take them – government property.’
But not me, not now the government has used me and no longer needs me, she thought as a rag was rammed into her mouth. André tied the ends tightly behind her head, so tightly her eyelids were dragged downwards. Through the slit she’d seen the honey badger policeman turn away.
She tried now to concentrate on physical sensations rather than the fear numbing her brain. It was a smooth ride, so there must be tar beneath the tyres. They were on the great road then, the only asphalted strip in the Kalahari Desert. She’d seen it once on a map Marta had shown her, a thin red line running straight down the shin of Africa like a trickle of blood. Either side of it was nothing but flat brown space. How could that nothingness be her home? she’d wondered.
Her Kalahari was a place of high anthills and low salt pans. Of birds ruby and rust and turquoise and gold. Of animals striped, spotted, horned and clawed. Of towering baobab trees and close-clustered huts. Her mother had been there, raking mangetti nuts from the coals, scolding her for eating them before they cooled. And her father, leaning against a tree, sharpening his hunting knife against the skin on his heel. And people, many, many people to whom she was related by blood or name.
She’d stared and stared, boring into the map, trying to discern this detail until her eyeballs burned and the images liquefied like salt-pan mirages.
I tried to hold my history, fleshed in my mind, but now I see it only through thick smoke.
[1] White person
Purchase Links
Kalahari Passage: https://mybook.to/7qAtkQA
Koba series: https://mybook.to/T81RWsf
Author Bio
Candi Miller was born in southern Africa and has spent more than twenty years researching the first peoples of the region, a group who have now adopted the exonym of San or Bushmen. She taught creative writing at UK universities. She now lives in Cornwall where she is writing the last book of the Koba trilogy. She is republishing her novels to support a school feeding scheme she co-founded for San children in 2017.
Social Media Links –
https://candimiller.substack.com
Insta & TikTok @candimillerauthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092417402759
