Novel Traces Apartheid Legacy Through Two Continents, Student Revolt

Faraaz Mahomed’s debut novel, Mother/Land, opens on a law professor named Salim living in New York who discovers his existence stems from an affair between his mother, Sawligha, and an apartheid-era politician. That single revelation becomes the structural engine of the book, pulling together the Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa, Black Lives Matter activism in the United States, the forced removals of the Group Areas Act, and the daily texture of a Muslim immigrant navigating American life alongside his gay Afrikaans brother.

Building that architecture meant constructing several distinct narrative voices across multiple historical layers. Salim belongs to a recognizable type in contemporary fiction: the intellectually burdened immigrant in New York, weary and introspective. Mahomed found resonance with this archetype in Herzog, Open City, and Netherland, though she notes that two of those are themselves immigrant narratives. Her own background as a South African of Muslim origin living in New York informed the character, but she also drew from NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, finding in it complexities that mirrored Salim’s internal and familial struggles.

The relationship between Salim and Sawligha became the emotional core of the novel, anchoring what Mahomed describes as a dialogue spanning matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance. That focus led her to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Hisham Matar’s The Return, works distinguished by their prose and the intimacy with which they approach family. For the particular quality of lostness that Salim carries, Mahomed returned repeatedly to In a Strange Room, which she characterizes as brilliantly personal and relentless in its emotional honesty.

Constructing Sawligha’s arc presented a different set of challenges. Her story unfolds during the era of forced removals under apartheid, and Mahomed identified Richard Rive’s Buckingham Palace as a crucial reference text about District Six. Her own family history in the Johannesburg neighborhoods of Vrededorp, Fietas, Fordsburg, and Pageview provided an equally vital starting point. To establish the topography and build a reliable historical foundation for what remained of those districts, Mahomed relied on Sean Field’s Lost Communities, Living Memories and South African History Online.

Sawligha’s affair with an apartheid politician is fictional. Mahomed deliberately positioned Carl Lamprecht, the character who becomes Salim’s father, as a contemporary of DF Malan, drawing mainly from Wikipedia but using small historical details to construct Carl as a multidimensional figure rather than a political abstraction.

Capturing Salim’s naive goodness required a different literary reference entirely. Mahomed found a model in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, drawn to the tragedy and beauty of a protagonist who intellectualizes excessively yet finds himself inadequate to the world’s demands. That bittersweetness shaped not only Salim’s voice but also that of Aa’isha, his eight-year-old daughter, whom Mahomed describes as the novel’s wisest character.

Aa’isha was the most demanding creative challenge. She perceives the world’s intricacies with clarity while finding adult contradictions and self-deceptions nonsensical. Mahomed spent considerable time reading works featuring child perspectives, including Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice, attempting to calibrate Aa’isha’s vocabulary, logic, and temperament. Drawing on her background as a psychologist, Mahomed also consulted Piaget and Erikson’s developmental theories, though she acknowledges no illusions about achieving perfect accuracy. The final voice carries a precociousness she ultimately decided to preserve, recognizing in it a particular unreliable humanness that strengthens the character. Children in fiction, she observes, often become the most perceptive figures precisely because their insight exceeds their linguistic capacity to articulate it.

By contrast, the novel’s metaphysical dimensions required a different set of models altogether. For Sawligha’s existence as a ghost, Mahomed drew on Zuleika Dobson, crafting the paranormal elements with deliberate ambivalence toward reality itself. Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night and Ben Okri’s Famished Road trilogy provided models for storytelling that traverses between worlds, offering what Mahomed describes as gifts that shaped her narrative approach across Mother/Land’s multiple temporal and geographical registers.

Whether the novel’s layered architecture holds together across all those registers is the question readers will bring to it.