In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Louise Stradling Enthrals With Factional Recounting Of The Langa Funeral Massacre

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On The Table Read Magazine, “the best book magazine in the UK“, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Louise Stradling sees a fictional retelling of the Langa massacre during South African apartheid, which resulted in 23 people being killed by South African police.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

In a gripping and haunting story of one of the darkest times in South Africa’s repressive apartheid regime, Cloud Cuckoo Land sees fictionalised in the Eastern Cape in 1985 and the events of the Langa massacre. Having grown up in the area of the massacre, Louise Stradling shares a tale of her two protagonists  – a white policeman, Kobus Jonker and young Xhosa man, Winston Mbele.

The injustices of apartheid in South Africa have been bubbling beneath the surface for over forty years, and in 1985 they broke cover to unleash a storm in a little backwater dorp called Uitenhage. That hot, windy March day would change the face of South Africa as the blood of innocent black people soaked into the orange clay.

Winston is a young Xhosa man attempting to rebuild his life in the township of Langa. Kobus Jonker is his white counterpart who cannot free himself from the yoke of apartheid. The two men share a catastrophe that threatens to destroy them both.

The story explodes onto the international stage, starting the slow death knell of white rule and apartheid, as the massacre prompting an international outcry. Protagonists Kobus and Winston are in centre stage for the incendiary and reprehensible events that resulted in members of South African police opening fire on a crowd attending a funeral.

With the event holding a special place in the history of resistance to apartheid, Louise Stradling herself remembers hearing the gunshots and seeing wounded people running past the shop where she worked on 21^st March 1985. With echoes of what she saw and heard etched in her memory, Cloud Cuckoo Land is the compelling and thought provoking culmination of her efforts to ensure the victims of the Langa Massacre are never forgotten.

Louise Stradling

My book culminates with the Langa massacre which happened nearly forty years ago in March. It is pertinent because we are almost, as mentioned, forty years on from this event. Many people are aware of the Soweto upraising where over 170 black people were killed and Sharpeville (which also happened on 21 March – but in 1960) and 69 people killed. Very few people know of the Langa uprising where 23 people were killed by the South African police. Here I try to tell their story. 

I grew up in the Elands River Valley, Eastern Cape, South Africa and in many ways, I had a magical childhood where I had freedom to be a child against the backdrop of apartheid.

While working in Uitenhage after matriculating, thinking about my future, I became aware of gunshots and wounded and screaming people streaming past the shop where I worked. That was the day of those terrible killings in Langa. Since then, Langa has niggled and nudged at me for nearly forty years. Now living in the shadow of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, I finally feel able to tell this story. As I walk and roam through Wiltshire, even here in the lush green countryside, I hear them beg me to tell their story.

-Louise Stradling

Find more from Louise Stradling now:

Kindle: https://amzn.to/4a2eMO9

Paperback: https://amzn.to/4a3AvoQ

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