When Gloria, a 16-year-old Ghanaian, more or less flunks junior high school a friend of the family arranges for her to become a nanny for a doctor with a two-year-old son. Stuff does happen in this novel--good things and fair amount of bad things, but it mostly feels like a character development story.
Published in 1969 by a mixed race African, this novel about a farming community in Botswana clearly has a lot of weight, but unfortunately I lack the history to fully understand what's going on and its significance at the time. I think my reaction to the book would have been much more powerful if I could fully appreciate what was going on politically, and perhaps also culturally. The writing is fairly spare and detached, always third person, and moving from one point-of-view to another fairly rapidly.