Upturned Earth is set in Namaqualand, the copper mining district of the Cape Colony, during the winter of 1886.
William Hull arrives at the town to take up the position of magistrate, a position that no one else wanted to accept because of the bleak and depressing locale. He finds that the town is run by the Cape Copper Mining Company and the despotic mine superintendent, Townsend. Meanwhile, Molefi Noki, a Xhosa mining labourer, is intent on finding his brother who was sent to jail for drunkenness and has yet to be released.
Set against the background of a diverse community, made up of white immigrants, indigenous people and descendants of Dutch men and native women, we are given insight into the daily life of a mining town and the exploitation of workers, harsh working conditions and deep-seated corruption that began with the start of commercial mining in South Africa in the 1850s and which continue until now.
While Upturned Earth is a novel about the past, its concerns are very much founded in the present.
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[Four men filled cylindrical basket-lift, their shoulders wedging them tightly against its inner rim]***
(@HollandParkPres, 4 September 2019, 188 pages, ebook, copy from @HollandParkPres and voluntarily reviewed)
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I didn't know what to expect when I decided to read this book but it intrigued me which is always a good place to start. The town where I grew up was once a mining village though the mines were long closed before I was born but the village is very proud of its ancestors so I have a bit of a soft spot for miners and mining villages. Of course, I know nothing of mining in South Africa so this book really opened my eyes. I enjoyed the author's note which explained the events are fictional but the mining towns and companies featured are real which I found fascinating. The novel is quite horrific and brutal at times which I didn't expect from historical fiction. The events in the novel seem to mirror more recent news stories. The author is new to me and I was very impressed by Upturned Earth so will seek out more of her work. The plot alternates between an educated white man who's the authority figure and a black mining labourer. The author really brings the place and era to life. Impressive!
