Afrish – Verenia Keet

Description

Afrish is about race and identity, haves and have-nots, and spans two decades leading into South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy.

The plot is woven around Meisie Marais and her quest to escape the ghosts of her past and Sydney Higgins, who, when his parents die in a tragic car accident, is thrust into the future in search of a family secret.

Meisie is both inadvertently and forcefully separated from the security of her middle-class White family because her view of race is poles apart from that of her father’s support for apartheid and his unforgiving stance of the path his daughter wishes to follow. Sydney, on the other hand, raised in an environment of extreme wealth, is hurtled headlong into discovering surprising details about his life as willed in his father’s final testament.

Meisie and Sydney do not meet each other throughout the story, but each is confronted with erasing race to honor identity.