A Study Guide for Sheila Gordon's "Waiting for the Rain"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sheila Gordon's "Waiting for the Rain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842273

Book preview

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Waiting for the Rain

Sheila Gordon

1987

Introduction

Waiting for the Rain: A Novel of South Africa, published in 1987, is the second of three novels written by the white South African author Sheila Gordon about the trials of apartheid in her country of birth. Gordon could not help but notice the countless injustices inflicted on black Africans during her youth in the 1930s and 1940s, and her discontent with a discriminatory society was what prompted her decision to raise her family in the United States. But, as Gordon noted in an Atlantic interview with Tony Lecht-man and David Watta, perhaps the place of one's birth is stamped indelibly on one's sensibility—and in her literary career, she found herself drawn to writing about her homeland with a young-adult audience in mind. She first conceived of Waiting for the Rain when watching on television a group of white South African soldiers riding into a township to subdue a black student protest. The soldiers looked as young and scared as the students. Gordon remarked in the Atlantic interview that the novel deals with how children regard the ‘Other,’ or those who are different from themselves.

Waiting for the Rain follows the lives of two youths—Frikkie, who is white, and Tengo, who is black—as they grow up sharing experiences on Frikkie's uncle's farm, where Tengo's family works. While Frikkie longs to leave school behind and begin his working life as a farmer, Tengo finds himself endlessly pondering questions about how the world works and craving formal studies. Their lives diverge when Tengo moves to a township outside Johannesburg, a hotbed of student-led political resistance and rage against apartheid, to pursue an education. Waiting for the Rain earned Gordon the Jane Addams Peace Prize, a children's book award, in 1988 and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association.

Author Biography

Gordon was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on January 22, 1927. Through her youth, she became acutely aware of the unjust conditions faced by black children, who were often barefoot as well as hungry. First noting black Africans' inability to enjoy the comforts and privileges provided by white schools and libraries, she later realized that blacks were also denied many basic civil rights and even human rights. Unable to ignore the cruelty that she witnessed, while attending the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, Gordon became an antiapartheid activist. She earned a bachelor of arts in English literature in 1946 and married Harley Gordon, a physician, the following year. The couple had