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A Novel
by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Book Reviewed by:Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University's Windham–Campbell Prize.
Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family's exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon's Mines fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.
With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people "half-broken" by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic.
THE ANONYMOUS WOMAN
1985-PRESENT
There was a time before this. I did not always live in the attic.
There were moments in my childhood that were happy and there were moments in my childhood that were not happy. Somewhere in between, I lost my name, but there will be time to tell of this later. What matters now is that I left that childhood, with its moments of happiness and moments of unhappiness, in the Old Country when my mother took me to live with her in the New Country.
Without that journey to the New Country, my life would have never taken the turn that led me to John B. Good IX. I was twenty-one years old when I met him, and it is because of that meeting that I am here now. I had had five relationships by then – one relationship's ending seamlessly blending into another's beginning – and perhaps because of this, because of the ease of transition, I felt worldly enough to enter into a relationship with a man almost ten years my senior.
I was on a Fulatha scholarship, ...
BookBrowsers Ask Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
I'm glad you brought up King Solomon's Mines. I find it fascinating that you chose to reference that book to such an extent in *The Creation of Half-Broken People." What inspired you to choose that novel as a jumping off point for your own? I love the way you took a racist book and flipped it on ...
-kim.kovacs
The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
@Jill_Mercier I'm glad you're reconsidering it; it's one of those books I think is really special. I absolutely want to read it again. The plot is full of layers, nuance, and "Easter eggs," and I know I missed some of that on the first read-through. I'm kind of a genre-neutral reader; there are v...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? (4/3/2025)?
Just finishing up Isola by Allegra Goodman ( really enjoying it), then on to The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu. In audiobook format, I just bought Hour of the Witch and Skeletons at the Feast , both by Chris Bohjalian. Any recommendations on which I should lis...
-kim.kovacs
The narrative is a complex blending of literary styles. The book's jacket calls it "African gothic" and the story's overall framework plays with tropes common to the gothic genre (e.g., the madwoman in the attic, apparitions, bloody specters). The narrator's overlaying tale has a hallucinogenic quality to it. As the protagonist delves into past generations, though, the tenor shifts from a spooky ghost story to more traditional historical fiction. Ndlovu focuses on the intergenerational trauma resulting from British colonialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, using the colonizers' actions in Bulawayo to illustrate her points. The story is largely told from the viewpoint of those whose voices are often lost in history ("misremembered, misbegotten and forgotten women"), unfolding through three of the narrator's specters, each of whom represents a different period in Bulawayo's history...continued
Full Review
(867 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland
This is a writer who should make everyone sit up. Rémy Ngamije, author of The Eternal Audience of One and Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space
Ndlovu richly deserves her place in the African pantheon of storytellers. This is a spectacular work of research and an intimate tale about the corrosive effects of colonialism and conquest. Shubnum Khan, author of The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil and Onion Tears
Mesmerizing! The Creation of Half-Broken People will transport you on a haunting journey to the heart of what makes us human.
King Solomon's Mines, a novel by H. Rider Haggard, is referenced throughout Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu's African gothic historical fiction work The Creation of Half-Broken People.
After Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) had returned to England from a stint as an administrator in South Africa, his brother suggested a wager: he would pay him five shillings if he could write a book "half as good" as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Haggard accepted the wager, and over a few weeks in 1885 dashed off the manuscript for what would become King Solomon's Mines. Once the book hit the shelves it was an instant success. It's credited with being the first in the Lost World genre — a subgenre of science fiction that revolves ...
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Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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