Summary of Eve Fairbanks's The Inheritors

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 When Malaika’s mother, Dipuo, was ten years old, she began reading books that her neighbor, a maid, brought home from her job. She loved reading about romance, and her favorite book was A Perfect Stranger.

#2 The community that Dipuo grew up in was known for its proverbs and metaphors. When Dipuo’s mother, Matshediso, was born, she would have been called a ngoana, or a little being not too different from an animal. Only when she began to talk would she become a mothoana, or a person.

#3 In Johannesburg, black women were employed as maids in white families’ literal kitchens. The few times Dipuo’s mother went to work in a white woman’s kitchen, she was given leftovers while the madam gave her dogs kibble.

#4 As a child, Dipuo always wanted more than what she had. She would make you feel bad if you wanted Christmas clothes or school shoes, her friend recalled. She would always shout, Where do you expect I can get that money. I earn so little.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350063004

IRB Media

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Insights on Eve Fairbanks's The Inheritors

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

When Malaika’s mother, Dipuo, was ten years old, she began reading books that her neighbor, a maid, brought home from her job. She loved reading about romance, and her favorite book was A Perfect Stranger.

#2

The community that Dipuo grew up in was known for its proverbs and metaphors. When Dipuo’s mother, Matshediso, was born, she would have been called a ngoana, or a little being not too different from an animal. Only when she began to talk would she become a mothoana, or a person.

#3

In Johannesburg, black women were employed as maids in white families’ literal kitchens. The few times Dipuo’s mother went to work in a white woman’s kitchen, she was given leftovers while the madam gave her dogs kibble.

#4

As a child, Dipuo always wanted more than what she had. She would make you feel bad if you wanted Christmas clothes or school shoes, her friend recalled. She would always shout, Where do you expect I can get that money. I earn so little.

#5

Black people needed to overcome their inferiority complex. They needed to stop caring what white people thought of them.

#6

The author’s mother took her shopping downtown once a year. She would gaze at the rows of black- patent-leather Mary Janes, their toes polished so bright that she could see her reflection.

#7

As a child, Christo’s favorite pastime was exploring the farm his family owned. He loved hearing the sounds of nature and imagining he was alone in an uninhabited wilderness.

#8

The donga is an erosion gully that running water carves in South Africa’s dusty soil. The word comes from the isiZulu udonga. White people have been in South Africa for four hundred years, but they rarely borrowed words from the country’s black languages.

#9

Piet’s forefathers had a defiant attitude, and this was vital to their success. The Dutch East India Company, which established the first colony at Cape Town in the 1600s, had the reach of the entire corporate power of the twenty-first century United States.

#10

The Dutch doctor Gerard van Depner published pamphlets describing the miracles in Europe’s overseas colonies. The colonies