Journey to Jo'burg: A South African Story

Product Information

Banned by the apartheid government in South Africa, this is the story of two children’s courage and determination to find their mother and bring her home. It might be hard, at first, for them to keep the characters straight, since I even struggled with that as an adult. The children learn about Grace's brother, Dumi, who was arrested for protesting, or speaking out against, apartheid.

However Journey to Jo’burg soon found its way into many different countries, in English and in translations, so that hundreds of thousands of children elsewhere were soon reading it. My father is from South Africa originally and I still have family there, so I was interested in seeing how whites were portrayed in this book.I will recommend this book to any young reader and not forgetting older ones who would be able to learn about hardships non whites were facing.

This new edition of Beverley Naidoo's classic story includes a special "Why You'll Love This Book" introduction by Michael Rosen, the Children's Laureate.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It seems clear that the point of the novel is to point up some of the major problems with apartheid, but at the same time it seems to downplay those problems too much. Certain that their sister needs a doctor, they decide to disobey their grandmother’s wishes and leave their small town to journey to Johannesburg where their mother works as a servant to get her help. We have used it as a basis for topic work - dressed the room and created an impressive visual display, studied South Africa including its geographical features and compared them with the features of England.