Book Description

This action packed reader-gripping book is a grueling harsh journey of Zimbabweans who cross borders into South Africa illegally, in search of greener pastures. Their worst nightmare is not only the crocodile infested river Limpopo that they cross, but also what they locally call Amagumaguma, a notorious gang of thieves and contract slayers who prey on the little possessions they migrate with, rape or sodomize them and ruthlessly butcher the vulnerable in order to sell their body parts to local witchdoctors and those afar. These grisly murderers have laid into graves many lives! The ill-fated border jumpers also have to contend with vicious, ravenous predators like lions, leopards and hyenas and other such carnivores in search of easy prey. Brutal soldiers vigilantly guarding these borders for trespassers also add to their woes. Of course, these law-breaking border-jumpers have those who help them out. For a fee of a thousand five hundred rands or two hundred American dollars, the Malayisha (cross-border taxi drivers) transport them from various parts of Zimbabwe to the Beit-Bridge border post, where they are handed over to the Impisi (escorts) at secluded rendezvous outside the border posts. These Impisi are paid by the Malayisha to escort their passengers without passports, across river Limpopo right up to near Musina in South Africa where they pick them up again and take them to Johannesburg. The border jumpers however risk all these predators that hunt down anything that moves throughout the night. In the novel, we meet Themba Khumalo who had always wanted to go to the lucrative South Africa but did not have Malayisha' s fees until when his father died, he inherited two of his father's donkeys and gave them to a local Malayisha as payment in kind, for the fees to take him to Johannesburg. What he did not know was that where he was going, the familiar became mysterious and the unfamiliar, gruesome and bizarre indeed! It was a place of delusion and paradox with a very thin line between life and death, as too many predatory eyes were fixed on the prey!