Khalil's Journey

'The voice of the voiceless has been emancipated with great skill...'
Mongane Wally Serote
'Beautifully (and differently) written... traces a real history of SA through minor, ordinary details of a family's life and a few extraordinary experiences of not-very-powerful people.'
Rehana Rossouw, Business Day
'A fascinating perspective on Cape Town as an Indian Ocean city, drawing on both Malay and Indian strands...'
Isabel Hofmeyr
'He felt a compulsion to remember as much as he could, to make a good yarn out of the story trying to burst out. Khalil tried to contain it, to bottle it up, to close the lid on it, but it kept bubbling up, trying valiantly to get itself told...'
Ashraf Kagee, winner of the seventh annual European Union Literary Award, evokes the richly-textured beauty of everyday life of the last century's Cape Malay and Indian cultures, and deftly captures the lyrical resonance of voices long forgotten by history.
Khalil, 'the Companion', is given his name by The One Above at his birth in 1903. Despite evidence of this divine interest, Khalil's eighty-odd years of life remain fairly ordinary - even though many of these years are spent under the far from ordinary conditions of The System in South Africa.