Dugmore Boetie epub Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost

A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds. The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie&;s response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa&;s oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie&;s story, as one critic puts it, offers &;an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes&; that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets&; refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africa&;s bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As &;a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts,&; Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggie&;s Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie&;s narrative celebrates humanity&;s relentless drive to survive at any cost. This new edition of Boetie&;s out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams&; haunting poem, &;Soweto Funeral,&; composed after attending Boetie&;s interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.