The Purple Violet of Oshaantu

The world of the novel is Owamboland, the flat communal farmland of far northern Namibia, where homesteads sit among the mahangu fields and the year turns on the rains. The narrator watches her friend's marriage and widowhood in the village of Oshaantu, while the regional towns near Oshakati draw the men away to wage work. The map runs from the fictional village out across the real Owambo lands to Oshakati and Ongwediva.

Mee Ali

The Owambo communal lands

The land

The story belongs to the flat, densely settled communal lands of far northern Namibia, home to the Ovawambo people. Life here runs on subsistence farming and on the strict social rules that bind a village together, and it is against this landscape that the narrator measures every marriage she describes.

Setting

explicit Owamboland, the communal farmland of the northern Ovawambo, is the real region the novel is set in; a whole district has no single point, so this marks its heart between Oshakati and Ondangwa.

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