BOOK REVIEW: The Sacred Hills by Lucas Ledwaba Reviewed by Chepape Makgato
Lucas Ledwaba’s The Sacred Hills is a landmark debut in historical fiction, steeped in the politics of land, memory, and rural resistance in apartheid South Africa. Set in the winter of 1974, the novel follows the fate of the Rhwasha community as it faces imminent forced removal by the apartheid government to make way for a Whites Only holiday resort — an act of violence cloaked in conservationist language and carried out by state agents with impunity. Photo Courtesy of Lucas Ledwaba At the heart of the novel is Lebone Gegana, a young villager arrested and tried in Pretoria for the murder of Jacobus Potgieter, an official from the Department of Nature and Conservation. Potgieter’s death, a consequence of the community’s resistance to dispossession, frames the novel’s central tension: what does it mean to defend one’s ancestral land when that defence is criminalised? Lebone becomes a symbolic figure standing trial not only for a single act, but for centuri...
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