Wrong Foundation of Love: The True Story Janet Thulisile Hlophe

"Women must be sure of their relationships with their partners, and ask themselves: is this true love?" Janet Thulisile Hlophe was born in 1964, in a Zulu family in rural KwaZulu-Natal. She grew up in a house with no running water, in a culture where an older person is always right and a young woman is always in the service of men. She was married against her will. For sixteen years her husband decided where she could go, who she could look at, whether she could speak. He turned on the children too. This is her account of those years - told plainly, without pleading - and of everything that came after: the day the police finally took him away, the long recovery, and the work she found going door to door for the Red Cross and later the Salvation Army. Janet told her story to Gunter Gys over two years, hour after hour, beginning in August 2008. It was first published in 2010 and appears here in a new edition. Today she lives in Umgababa with her children. "I am grateful that I am an independent woman, but the scars are not gone."