UThando LwaseMnambithi

"Uthando LwaseMnambithi” (trans: With Love from Ladysmith/The Love Story From Ladysmith) is a fictional, beautiful love story about two young people who grew up in rural KwaZulu Natal. The book opens with the Khumalo family, a middle-class rural home where alcohol and gender-based violence is the order of the day. A family where hatred and resentment has contributed immensely to the physical neglect of the children.

In graphic detail, the book demonstrates how substance abuse can lead to an unhappy marriage. As much as the book is about love, it is also a story of the triumph of the human spirit and of overcoming adversity. The Khumalo children, who grew up under extremely difficult conditions, refused to allow their family circumstances and poor background to define them.

Sakhile Khumalo and his siblings left their familiar rural home for the uncertainty of the big cities of Johannesburg and Durban to begin their own lives and to further their studies. That leap of faith marked the beginning of great but steady changes in their entire lives. Sakhile met the love of his life, his first love, in boarding school at Umlazi, South of Durban. His girlfriend who later became his wife, Ziphezinhle Bhengu completed the family puzzle. Like many other families, they experienced tragic events, pain and setbacks that tested their love for each other. However, in the end love and a deep sense of unity sustained them.

MaCele, a widow from eBhubesini, a rural teacher and a single mother of four, was able to instil core family values of love, unity, respect and the value of education to her children. The love story goes beyond the borders of South Africa. This story might have started in the dusty streets of KwaZulu-Natal hinterland, but the blossoming lives of the Khumalo children lays credence to the idiom that “the world is your oyster.”