There would be no manual labor for Zodwa’s brother. Dumisa would be the first man in the family who would go to work in a suit and tie, using his brain rather than his muscles, and as he prospered, he would pull his family up behind him as a reward for all the sacrifices they’d made.

That had been the plan and for the first while, everything had gone better than expected. Dumisa sent money home every month and soon could even afford to buy a secondhand car due to a promotion. His letters were filled with descriptions of the things he’d bought, the house he was saving for, and the many gifts he was setting aside for the family. He was the embodiment of the country’s hope for their black sons, and he was living the kind of life the rest of them had never dared to dream of.

But all that changed once Dumisa was recruited by the Inkatha Freedom Party Youth Brigade in Soweto. Within months of joining the resistance movement, he mysteriously vanished like so many anti-apartheid activists before him. The last person to have seen him alive reported seeing Dumisa being tortured by the security police for refusing to betray his comrades. The man spoke of his bravery and honor, and after that Dumisa was hailed a hero for his efforts on behalf of his people.

Leleti would have preferred a living son who was realizing his potential than one who’d died to advance the cause of the masses. Since her son’s body was never recovered, Leleti refused to accept that he was dead. There was no final resting place for him—no grave site where Leleti could find peace—and so she kept searching for him even as she built a shrine to him, adding a stone to a pile for every day that he was gone.

After Dumisa disappeared, it fell to Zodwa to live out the dreams everyone had had for her brother, but instead of stepping out from under his shadow into her own light, Zodwa has cast a deeper darkness upon herself and her family, one of her own making and impossible to escape: shame. For while teenage pregnancies are nearly commonplace in the township, they’re not something that happen to Khumalos.

Leleti shakes her head now. “What is the use of freedom if you are not going to grab the opportunities that I fought for—the opportunities that Dumisa fought for—so you could have a future? You may as well be a maid if having babies is the best you can imagine for yourself.”

Zodwa hangs her head.

“And for what, my child?” Leleti asks. “Where is the father of the baby? There is no man here who loves you.” Her voice breaks. “The good Lord knows that you do not even want this child.”