Burn My Heart is another amazing book from Beverley Naidoo. In this story set in Kenya in 1951-1953, we meet Mathew – the white pre-teen son of a landownder and Mugo – the African son of the farm’s chief caretaker. They share a friendship that is beginning to show the strains caused by their places in the world they inhabit. A worse threat is looming around them both however, with the growing Mau Mau rebellion led by the Kenyans to reclaim their ancestral land from the white British settlers. Suspicion, accusations, brutality and betrayal escalate until everything in Mathew’s and Mugo’s world changes.
The larger question in this book is that of loyalty. What does it mean? To whom should you be loyal and why? What do you do when you know something isn’t right and yet you are just one individual in the face of a larger, unjust system? Naidoo provides no easy answers in any of her novels, and the same holds true for Mathew and Mugo in Burn My Heart. Naidoo examines these questions with political insight and sensitivity in a provocative, eloquent story. She demonstrates an insight into her characters and their condition and she is sympathetic to both the plight of Mathew and Mugo. While her politial message overshadows characters’ development at times, Naidoo successfully evokes the fears and moral dilemmas plaguing both European and native peoples in the late-Colonial era.
- Posted by Cori