A Conversation with Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of CASUALTIES OF TRUTH.

What is Casualties of Truth about?

Casualties of Truth begins in D.C. with my protagonist, Prudence Wright, a successful businesswoman turned stay-at-home-mom, driving with her husband, Davis, to a dinner with his new work colleague. The colleague, Matshdiso, turns out to be someone Prudence knew in South Africa twenty-two years earlier who has tracked her down. Prudence and Matshediso don’t openly acknowledge knowing each other at dinner, but his sudden appearance immediately turns Prudence’s stable life upside down, forcing her to come to terms not only with the sorrow of her childhood years, but also the costs of the wreckage she and Matshediso left behind in Johannesburg. With the threat of blackmail hanging over her, Prudence joins forces with Matshediso, sending them on a political and personal reckoning that gives rise to a resilience and an alarming ferocity that even Prudence wasn’t aware she possessed.

The novel is inspired by my time in South Africa in 1996 and what I saw at the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings which was set up to bring to light the past horrors of Apartheid.

Would you please tell us about your two main characters, Prudence and Matshediso? 

Prudence grew up in Baltimore and is a brilliant and successful business consultant who is the mother to an autistic son and wife to a law firm partner. Prudence had an early family tragedy that she overcame to build a nice, safe life that she maintains by being an expert at compartmentalizing. 

Matshediso was born and raised in KwaNdebele, South Africa during apartheid. He was adopted when he was thirteen years old and lived in Sweden until he takes a job in Washington D.C. He and Prudence both have past traumas that shaped them, but unlike Prudence, Matshediso cannot keep the past in the past. He’s a tech consultant and very earnest, but he also has a vengeful streak that hasn’t served him well. 

 Why were you in South Africa in 1996?

I was a law student interning in Johannesburg when the new South African government had just opened a way for anyone who had committed crimes during apartheid to avoid conviction or liability if they gave truthful accounts of their actions. I realized as I was watching the Amnesty hearings that I would probably never see anything like this again and decided to write down every word I heard. I carried those notepads with me for over 20 years until I opened the box during the pandemic thinking that maybe it was time to write this novel.

What do you want people to know about the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings?

Prudence is an observer at the hearings. She’s living in a post-Apartheid South Africa and like most of the world at this time, knows little about what took place during that era. However, she understands that the country wants to move forward from its past upheaval. The truth and reconciliation process, at the time, seemed like the best option for the new government who had to contend with continued Apartheid loyalists and the documentation that would have implicated thousands of them, being destroyed. So, there were many truths that never would have come to light but for the process of offering amnesty in exchange for truthful testimony. But it was also extremely hard for some of the victims and their families to accept that their perpetrators would walk away just because they confessed. This is where this book lives, at the intersection of the individual’s need for justice and institutional mandates.  

Can you give some examples of what you learned during the hearings?

During the hearings, many people learned for the first time that there were weekly meetings in Pretoria where men from the security branch and the state police decided which leader of the Black resistance movement needed to be tortured or killed. We also learned that even school children were killed for simply passing out leaflets, and that the South African government attacked other countries in southern Africa with bombs and sent specially trained troops into sovereign nations for being a sanctuary to South African resistance fighters. We learned about the highly effective propaganda machine, which involved media control, blinding many South Africans and the world to the truth. And we learned that the moment the Apartheid state could see they were losing control of the country, they destroyed all the documents that detailed the security apparatus weaponized against non-white South Africans. Nothing is left but memory.  

What do you think about South Africa’s future prospects?

No one in this novel knows the answer to this question. How could they? If I asked someone in 1806, thirty years after the US constitution was written, if we would turn out to be one of the most powerful countries to ever exist, that person would probably have laughed. Though South Africa has one of the greatest constitutions ever written, it is also only a 30-year-old democracy. There have only been five election cycles since Mandela’s presidency and understandably the ANC (African National Congress) was always favored to win because it was the party that guided the country into this new democratic state. Now is the time for something new and South Africans made that clear in the last election. That historic vote means that South Africans remain hopeful and where there is hope, there is great possibility. 

You shift between 1996 to 2018 in the first half of the novel. Why did you decide to do this?

Prudence hasn’t wanted to think about her time in South Africa, but when Matshediso arrives at her husband’s dinner, she has no choice. She doesn’t admit knowing him to her husband because she’s afraid of what may come to light, but she begins remembering the last night she and Matshediso saw each other and the confusion she still feels about it. She also remembers the week she sat through the Amnesty hearings and heard the details of the murder of a group of boys kidnapped by a Black South African police operative. She’s pushed and pulled from past to present as the dinner unfolds, but after the dinner, when it becomes clear that Matshediso has come to Washington intending to draw her into his inner turmoil, Prudence is forced to be very present once again and the story finds its footing in 2018.

Race, class, gender, motherhood, marriage are themes that run through all of your books, especially this one. Why are these themes important to you?

We lead complicated lives. And these lives are made more complicated when we have to confront all the ways the world contends with our presence, whether we are tall or Black or whether we are accompanied by children or even what clothes we wear. My novels are always about big swaths of a character’s life and I see these themes as an opportunity to show the essential truths of my characters’ worlds. Prudence is a fully formed, flawed human in these pages and family is key to her world. But what becomes most essential to her when Matshediso arrives in D.C. is protecting this family. We’ve had lots of stories about men making dangerous decisions because there’s a home to protect. This time, we get to see a woman do it.