Excerpt from The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

THE ANONYMOUS WOMAN

1985-PRESENT

There was a time before this. I did not always live in the attic.

There were moments in my childhood that were happy and there were moments in my childhood that were not happy. Somewhere in between, I lost my name, but there will be time to tell of this later. What matters now is that I left that childhood, with its moments of happiness and moments of unhappiness, in the Old Country when my mother took me to live with her in the New Country.

Without that journey to the New Country, my life would have never taken the turn that led me to John B. Good IX. I was twenty-one years old when I met him, and it is because of that meeting that I am here now. I had had five relationships by then – one relationship's ending seamlessly blending into another's beginning – and perhaps because of this, because of the ease of transition, I felt worldly enough to enter into a relationship with a man almost ten years my senior.

I was on a Fulatha scholarship, successfully finishing my last year of university when I received an invitation from the Good Foun dation to what they called a Futures event. I knew that by 'Futures' the Good Foundation meant an opportunity to work for them. An internship that would hopefully turn into an entry-level position at the Good Foundation seemed like the best (if not obvious) way forward for a Fulatha scholar, and so I attended the event to which the Foundation had invited all its current scholar-ship recipients, secure in the knowledge that previous Fulatha scholars had used it as a stepping stone towards positions of power and influence the world over.

Although our families had once been connected, it had never occurred to me that I would one day meet John B. Good IX in person. He was a world-renowned photojournalist, had won two extremely prestigious awards before the age of thirty, had been on the cover of Time magazine at twenty-five, and his most lauded photograph – that of a man who had just been shot by a child soldier, reaching his hand out towards his killer – had been on the cover of Third World News Today. Everyone seemed to appreciate the way the photographer had been able to capture both supplication and forgiveness in that moment, that one gesture.

If there was a civil war somewhere in Africa, John B. Good IX was sure to be there with his camera, shooting the most heartwrenching photographs. The adjective 'courageous' was attached to his name in almost everything written about him. He had the kind of easy charm that got him in and out of places, which was how he managed to do his job as a conflict photojournalist so well. But what mattered most to me when I first met him at twenty-one, when he attended the Futures event, was that he was a man possessed of an almost impossible beauty. And so when he walked up to me and said, 'What an exotic creature you are,' I felt fate was smiling down on me for possibly the first time in my life. It all seemed so very fortunately fortuitous that I never thought to examine what it was I was actually feeling. I took it to be something I had never felt before: romantic love.

The incredible discovery was his: I became the exotic creature.

As I got to know John B. Good IX better, it became obvious to me that he was an emotional tourist – and I did not care. He saw me when he saw me, and loved me when and if he could – and I did not care. Once, in the early days of our knowing of each other, he took me to a club where the paparazzi took photographs of us leaving, and one of the pictures made it onto the front page of a popular tabloid. In the image we were holding hands, he was averting his face, and I was staring straight at the camera, startled into a new reality. The photograph was captioned 'Who Is That Girl?' I was not the first 'That Girl' attached to John B. Good IX, I would not be the last – and I did not care.

Excerpted from The Creation of Half-Broken People by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu. Copyright © 2025 by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu. Excerpted by permission of House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.