Chez Maximka: Kalahari Passage: Koba Book 2 by Candi Miller (book extract)

Friday, 10 October 2025

Kalahari Passage: Koba Book 2 by Candi Miller (book extract)

Celebrate Black History Month with a new powerful novel by Candi Miller. I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to publish a book extract on my blog.

Kalahari Passage: Koba book 2

Koba and Mannie have been in jail. Their crime, loving each other across the Apartheid colour bar in southern Africa. Koba escapes her captors and using her bush skills, finds her way across the semi-desert to her former tribal home. But adapting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after a decade away, has challenges. And her mortal enemy is on her trail.

Meanwhile Mannie absconds during his parole and sets off on a sub-continental road trip to find his beloved Koba. But will his new comrades persuade him to join them across the border for training in deadly guerrilla warfare? And what will that mean for his future with Koba?

Under tragic circumstances the lovers meet, but the danger they are in means they face heart-breaking choices.

Kalahari Passage is an action-packed story of a search for identity and love. Readers will be spellbound by Koba’s world where an ancient culture dances, trances and lives in harmony with the land.

Key ideas

● Unique FMC from world’s oldest living culture, largely unknown outside anthropology. The lineage of Koba’s people goes back to the dawn of humankind.

● Dispossession - ancestral land, cultural identity, freedom

● Interracial love - romantic and family

● Racial discrimination and defiance

● Recent black history - Apartheid South Africa 1960s

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Book Extract:

Intro for extract

This is a letter written by Marta Marais, mother of Mannie, to her foster daughter, Koba, who has been forcibly taken from them and repatriated to her former home in Bushmanland.

Impalala, near Hoedspruit

South Africa

30 September

My dearest Koba,

I don’t know if this will reach you. I shall send it care of my sister-in-law, Mrs Aletta Marais, at Weltevrede farm, in South West Africa. She was at the station when you left Johannesburg. She was the small woman in the very big hat, who was in front for every picture.

Lettie, if you are reading this, you shouldn’t be, it’s private. But if you’re here, let me assure you I am very grateful to you for helping the children. Truly. You succeeded where we failed, so don’t take my tease to heart. And please, please, Lettie, help me with one more favour – find a messenger to take this letter to Bushmanland. Ask them to give it to any Ju|’hoan person (Bushman) they see. Koba is from the Ju|’hoan band, which lives in the vicinity of Nyae Nyae. Just tell them to look for the girl who lived with the whites. She might still be wearing a yellow dress. God and you willing, this letter could end up in Koba’s hands. Thank you, my dear. I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, but we are, after all, sisters-in-law. That’s still true, isn’t it, even though Etienne is gone?

Kobatjie, my heart broke to see you in the pretty yellow dress in the back of a police van. You looked so small sitting next to that policeman they handcuffed to you. I have sent a letter to the authorities to complain. I have argued that you are still a child and they have no right to treat you so roughly. Well, they have no right to treat anyone brutally, but they do, we hear. But you, so small and alone, and after what you’ve been through! Oh, my dear, I shudder to think what detention must have been like for you. I heard such terrible stories during the months I stood outside with the other mothers. Ja-well, I must be careful what I write, Deon says. Still, someone should be brought to account and I will do what I can. Anyway, that’s for the future.

For now, I want you to know that never a day goes by when I don’t berate myself for taking you from South West Africa. If you’d never come to Impalala none of this might have happened. Oh, Koba, I lie in bed at night crying for the harm my family has done to you and yours. For pity’s sake, believe me when I say I only did what I thought was best for you. I thought I could keep you safe. Ja, I know, I should have made a plan to get you back to the Kalahari years ago, but even after only a year it was already too late – we’d all grown to love you.

Well, as you would say, ‘my heart is very heavy’. I am trying to believe that it all happened for the best, but I don’t know. I wish they’d let me talk to you. If you ever get this, perhaps you will write back, if you ever get pen and paper, or go near a post office. I don’t suppose there is one where you are going.

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Purchase Links

Kalahari Passage: https://mybook.to/7qAtkQA

Koba series: https://mybook.to/T81RWsf

Author Bio –

Candi Miller was born in southern Africa and has spent more than twenty years researching the first peoples of the region, a group who have now adopted the exonym of San or Bushmen. She taught creative writing at UK universities. She now lives in Cornwall where she is writing the last book of the Koba trilogy. She is republishing her novels to support a school feeding scheme she co-founded for San children in 2017.