Jah Hills by Unathi Slasha (Black Ghost Books, 2017)

Jah Hills is alone in the Kwafindoda bush, waiting for the elders to come, burn ibhuma and deliver him home when he is tricked, captured and turned into isithunzela. A creature trapped in a wardrobe by day and only freed at night, to move between the realm of the living and the dead. One night, he narrowly escapes and finds his way back. But home is no longer home.

Set between Kwafindoda, where the nature is alive and ghosts exist even before someone is dead, and South Africa’s gritty urban townships, Jah Hills explores the conflict between life and death, folklore and philosophy, the extraordinary and everyday so as to write the Unlanguaged World of today. A breathless journey, at once fevered, visionary and breathtakingly alive, Jah Hills invites the reader to find wilderness and brutality in the banal, the beautiful in the bizarre and to seek answers, not in the sum, but in the derangement of its many seething parts.


Jah Hills is available in print at the Chimurenga Factory (157 Victoria Rd, Woodstock, Cape Town) or from our online store.

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