blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

FICTION

PETER ORNER

From The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is set in a remote Catholic school on a farm named Goas in the desert veld of central Namibia, within sight of the Erongo Mountain range. In addition to several of the opening chapters, you will find here five previously unpublished chapters not included in the hardback edition. These additional chapters expand on Obadiah as well as offer a vignette involving Obadiah, Festus, Theofilus, and Vilho—all teachers at the school—along with the novel's principal narrator, a volunteer white teacher from Cincinnati named Larry Kaplanski. “Kaplansk,” as he comes to be called, becomes involved with Mavala Shikongo, a sometime teacher at the school who is a descendant of African nobility as well as a former freedom fighter. The novel takes place in the early 1990s, not long after Namibian independence from South Africa has been won.  blackbird bug

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Peter Orner Novel Cover
Little, Brown and Company, 2006

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006)
Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6 reprinted with permission.
begin excerpted chapters

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