A Blade of Grass

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

At the height of the apartheid in South Africa, Ben and Marit, a white
farmer and his bride, buy a farm next to the country’s border. They
have not been there long when guerilla fighters begin to infiltrate
across the border. A land mine laid by them kills Ben, and Marit in her
loneliness turns to Tembi, a black servant, for friendship.

The two young women are determined to continue farming, but everything
goes against them. As the district becomes more dangerous, the Afrikaner
neighbours move away; white government soldiers arrive seeking a
terrorist and scare the black farm workers into leaving; a wild animal
kills all their chickens; their cattle are stolen; the pump and
generator break down; a swarm of locusts decimates the vegetable crop;
and Tembi and a young black man, who may or may not be a guerilla
fighter, are abducted by a company of black soldiers, leaving Marit
alone and injured.

There is an awful sense of inevitability about what happens. The
senseless brutality of the two sides, who both feel they are fighting
for their future, is set against the dry beauty of the South African
landscape and the changing relationship between blacks and whites. The
characters become people not so much through dialogue as through their
thoughts, although at times their actions do not ring true. Despite the
repetitiousness of the writing, this is a very disturbing book.