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I Am Not Your Slave by Tupa Tjipombo, Chris Lockhart

There are unspeakable acts of depravity and cruelty in the memoir I Am Not Your Slave (Lawrence Hill Books) by Tupa Tjipombo and Chris Lockhart. It is hard to read, harder yet to believe that there are men in this world who can be so sadistic, so bestial, women who aid and abet them, and victims who are strong enough to endure the torture and degradation.

Here in the unforgiving vastness of wind-swept and drought-ravaged South Africa, hip-hop music blares from the open windows of dusty SUVs, hippos lumber through villages, poisonous snakes slither through the grass, and people scratch a living out of the dirt. They live in constant fear of crocodiles and leopards, witchcraft, starvation, and tribal violence; yet there is love and hope and the unshakable will to survive.

Tupa Tjipombo is the pseudonym of a Namibian woman whose childhood is the stuff of unthinkable nightmares. Banished from her village because of an accusation of witchcraft, Tupa is sent to live with an uncle in the city of Opuwo where she can go to school, but her dreams of a better life are quashed when she is summoned home to help her family survive a crippling drought. 

She accompanies her father and brothers driving a herd of livestock, but soon becomes a pawn in negotiations for access to water for the animals and the return of her (suspiciously) missing brothers. As part of the deal, she is promised to a scarred and tattooed man for a year of servitude. 

At that moment, Tupa enters the international underworld of human trafficking: she’s cargo in the back of rusted trucks, merchandise by the side of rutted roads, victim to repeated rapes and beatings. She’s starved and terrorized, branded, poisoned, and cursed. Her repeated attempts to escape are futile, the repercussions so horrific that it’s hard to believe that she survived them.

Tupa is bought and sold into sexual slavery, subjected to a mortifying, unforgettably agonizing life of physical and emotional corruption. Her unflinching determination to survive drives the book and drags her readers kicking and screaming and clutching for respite through every atrocity of her enslavement.

Tupa wanted her story told, as painful as it was for her to tell it, because according to her, the research and reports on human trafficking, no matter how well-intentioned, “…[do] not say anything. It is not my story. It is not anybody’s story. It will not make people act.” 

Statistics and data may fail to move even the most charitable; reading I Am Not Your Slave will move even the most stoic.

I Am Not Your Slave is now available for purchase.

 

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I Am Not Your Slave by Tupa Tjipombo, Chris Lockhart
Publish Date: 2020
Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction, Self Help
Author: Tupa Tjipombo, Chris Lockhart
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
ISBN: 9781641602370
Sherri Daley

Sherri Daley has been writing freelance for national and regional publications for many years, including MORE magazine, Car and Driver, and the New York Times. She is the author of a book about commodities traders and a ghostwriter for business motivational texts. As a freelancer, she has established herself as someone who will write about anything – from cancer treatments to the lives of Broadway stagehands to that new car smell, blueberry jam, and Joshua Bell’s violin. Her curiosity drives her to read about anything, too, and she’s eager to share what she likes with others. She says life’s too short to read a bad book. When she’s not reading, she’s tending her gardens in Connecticut where she lives with her cat and a cage of zebra finches, although she’d rather be living in Iceland. Visit her blog at sherridaley.com for more!