Lendle

With a Table of Contents. SHEBA'S VOW is a novel about the struggle for democracy on a "South American" island. South Chale is ruled by a military dictatorship that has divided the country into four different racial groups, each strictly segregated. On South Chale, Asians rule the nation, while whites and blacks are treated as a subservient subclass. Sheba is born into the most despised class of all, the mongrels, for the mongrels blur the differences between the races. After seeing her father persecuted by the State Security Police, Sheba vows to work for the overthrow of the dictatorship Their neighboring island (Suntos) has become communist, but here things are reversed—it is the blacks who rule over the whites and Asians. When Sheba visits Suntos to investigated whether they should seek the assistance of Soviet advisers, she finds a horror that is beyond anything she could have imagined. Sheba travels to Los Angles to try and gain American support against the dictatorship, but quite suddenly the dictator dies and there is a power struggle among the generals to appoint themselves President-for-life. Sheba returns home and becomes involved with the Democracy Movement. During the desperate fight for the presidency between the State Security Police and the Army, Sheba uses People Power, persuasion, and cunning in her life and death struggle to form a democratic government. SHEBA'S VOW is a blend of fact and fiction. South Chale, where the story takes place is largely an amalgam of Chile, Argentina, and South Africa of the 1980s. The neighboring island of Suntos is a reflection of the Ukraine in the 1930s when Stalin created one of the most desperate famines every experienced, resulting in seven million people starving to death. The final section is an epitome of the People Power events in the Philippines, Tiananmen Square, and Moscow. The novel is largely about a political and personal struggle to find a way out of the despair and violence of dictatorships, a reflection of world events during the period 1980-1995. From the novel: Three weeks after this law was passed, when the first rays of sunlight were striking the tops of the hills, bulldozers, tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and a dozen helicopters surrounded Lorentown. They were backed up by three thousand fully armed troops. Trucks came along the dusty streets with their loudspeakers shouting. We were to move out of our houses immediately because we were illegally inhabiting an A-Class area. The trucks waiting nearby would take us to our allocated township of Beauty Waters, free of cost. Our family, led by my father, came struggling out of our beds, sleepy-eyed and puzzled by the noise and the strange sight moving into our street. Papa stood defiantly watching the massive bulldozers coming up the hill towards our home. They were bright orange and clanked and rattled and belched black diesel fumes as they made their way slowly up the hill. The whole town stood awe-struck at their front gates, nonplussed by this approaching army of destruction. The enormous bulldozers crashed into the first wooden houses and shattered them to the ground. People began running into their homes trying to salvage their belongings, money, and sleeping children. The bulldozers waited for nothing. They smashed the houses flat, crushing everything in their path: crockery, vegetable gardens, baths, beds, kitchen tables, water tanks, and our lives. Troops armed with sjambok whips, automatic rifles, and flame throwers, drove the hysterical people before them. The men and women were in a turmoil of emotions unable to stop the steel, the flames, or the bulldozers smashing everything they had worked for into the dust. The noise was almost unbearably loud: circling helicopters with their stomach-thumping BOOMP, BOOMP, BOOMP, reverberated constantly in our heads. The women and children were screaming in anguish at the senseless destruction ...