Fabrics of Love by Lebo Mazibuko is not only a tale of the Ntoi women, but a larger narrative of black South African women. It features the protagonist Moipone/Popi Ntoi, Buang Ntoi and her two children Prettygal/Gal and Rosemary Ntoi, as they navigate the complexities of love, relationships, home, family, belonging, success, religion, marriage and what it means to exist in a society which is rabidly patriarchal that places unfair and impossible demands on women.

Told through the eyes of each of the women, the book gives voice to their struggles, joys, pain as well as the Ntoi women’s daily insistence on defining their world on their own terms. By deciding to have chapters in the story dedicated to or focussing on each of the women, Mazibuko fits into the feminist literature paradigm though that may not necessarily have been her intention. Even, Fumane, Buang and Seun’s mother, and Lemohang’s late wife has a stubborn presence in how Moipone is constantly reminded by her father, Sean and later by Lemohang, her grandfather of how she shares a striking with a woman she never got to meet.

In having the men play roles largely of ‘absence’ in the case of Kabo Meso, Gal and Rosemary’s father who they only meet later in story and even much later in their lives, and, Sean Ntoi who only comes into Popi’s life once a year when he visits Botshabelo to see her and his erstwhile ‘wife’, Keke, Mazibuko is showing a reality which is ubiquitous in much of South African society – that of absent fathers.

It is against this backdrop that music also plays a central role not only as a sonic placement or identifier, but as a soundtrack to life – be it at Lucky’s Tarven or some other ceremony or lobola negotiations, Mazibuko references Trompies’ Sweety Lavo to Tkzee's Mambotjie, Miriam Makeba’s Meet Me At The River and Caiphus Semenya & Letta Mbuli’s There's Music In The Air among others in the story. Even Famo music, a genre which if often associated with the accordion and is native to Lesotho appears in the story.

Books also play another key role in Fabrics of Love as through the reference to them we get a sense of the times, and what writers were preoccupied with articulating especially those from the rest of the continent. References to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Wole Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather are just but a few of the famous writers of African descent mentioned in the story through the book’s characters.

This review is part of the Book of the Month series 2026 from the Goethe-Institut South Africa. A new review by South Africans for South Africans will be published every month, check back regularly. 

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