By Onyeka Nwelue
Lethabo Khumalo works at the Department of Home Affairs in Pietermaritzburg. She is also a single mother raising three beautiful children.
When her new lover offers her an opportunity to earn an additional R45,000 per month, she immediately thinks about her mother’s leaking roof in Soweto and her eldest daughter’s university fees. Faced with mounting financial pressures, she says yes.
A gripping novel set against South Africa’s immigration system
Lethabo has spent years helping strangers navigate South Africa’s immigration system while quietly carrying the weight of her own disappointments.
She trusts paperwork more than promises and routine more than romance. However, everything changes when she meets Chukwudi Okonkwo, a charming Nigerian immigrant whose kindness seems almost too good to be true. For the first time in years, hope begins to return.
Some people enter our lives carrying more than affection. Hidden beneath ordinary conversations, family dinners, and dreams of a second chance lies a secret capable of changing everything Lethabo believes about love, trust, and the consequences of decisions made long ago.
Home Affairs gradually reveals how seemingly ordinary choices can lead to life-changing consequences, especially when desperation, hope and opportunity collide.
Love, loyalty and the cost of one decision
Set against the backdrop of South Africa’s immigration system, Home Affairs explores loneliness, belonging, family, redemption and the dangerous things people overlook when they desperately want to believe. Rather than relying solely on suspense, the novel also examines the moral compromises that financial hardship can create. The book raises difficult questions about corruption, loyalty and personal responsibility without losing sight of the emotional struggles facing its central characters.
As important colleagues begin disappearing from work, Lethabo starts to suspect that her lover is involved in something far more dangerous than she first imagined. Meanwhile, she continues approving applications for Nigerian immigrants and hiding cash-filled brown envelopes beneath her mattress. Eventually, she reaches a point where she must make an impossible decision. Yet one question remains: will she also disappear without a trace?
Blending crime, romance and social commentary, Home Affairs offers readers more than a compelling mystery. It paints a vivid portrait of ordinary people caught between survival and integrity, while highlighting the human realities behind immigration systems, economic hardship and fractured relationships.
The novel’s emotional depth and authentic South African setting make it an engaging read for anyone interested in character-driven contemporary fiction.
About the author
Onyeka Nwelue is a Nigerian writer, filmmaker, jazz musician, and trained anthropologist. He is also a Žižekian disciple and a Soyinkaphile. He has published more than 50 books, including the Crime Awards and ANA Prize-winning The Strangers of Braamfontein, which Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka described as “raunchy”, as well as Murder in Orania.
Nwelue is the founding director of the James Currey Society in Oxford. He has served as an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford and simultaneously as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. In addition, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Ohio University, a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg and a Visiting Assistant Professor of African Literature at the University of Manipur in Imphal, India.
- PUBLISHER | Bayan Street Books |
- ISBN | 978-1-0666000-1-4 |
- Recommended Retail Price | R300.00 |
- Classification | Novel |
For more information | Janine Daniel | +27 (0)83 327 3393 | mail me |