Cheryl Fillmore

A Monkey's Wedding (1967-1970) Cheryl Fillmore

Someone on the Highveld murmured it in 1967 for there's little doubt that a monkey was getting married in this snapshot memoir of a family living in South Africa under Apartheid.

At seventeen, a romantic and naïve Cheryl emigrates with her charming but hopelessly idealistic family to Johannesburg. To her, this is a new land, alien with its upside-down stars, croaking frogs and clattering windmills, a far cry from the marmalade skies and purple haze of the UK. As her wildly impractical family buy a smallholding with only the basic utilities, she finds herself having to navigate her way through a series of adventures and mishaps to self-discovery. Struggling through her own doubts and insecurities she grows into a young woman with first-hand insight into the variety of different cultures and the colourful characters that populated the region of that time. Her story is at times humorous and soul searching but these true accounts of the basic raw inequalities of apartheid are deeply disturbing.