Ougat: From a hoe into a housewife and then some

There’s an entire generation of South African women who ought to read this book.’ – Sara-Jayne King, author of Killing Karoline

‘Ougat is masterfully written – raw, unpretentious, unsettling. Shana Fife captures all the darkness from her body, psyche and life with fearless honesty and transparency.’ – Frazer Barry, award-winning theatre practitioner, writer and musician

By the time Shana Fife is 25 she has two kids from different fathers. To the Coloured people she grew up around, she is a jintoe, a jezebel, jas, a woman with mileage on the pussy. She is alone, she has no job and, as she is constantly reminded by her community, she is pretty much worthless and unloveable. How did she become this woman, the epitome of everything she was conditioned to strive not to be?

Unsettlingly honest and brutally blunt, Ougat is Shana Fife’s story of survival: of surviving the social conditioning of her Cape Flats upbringing, of surviving sexual violence and depression and of ultimately escaping a cycle of abuse.

A powerful, fresh and disarming new voice – Shana’s writing is like nothing you’ve read before.

© 2024 Jonathan Ball Publishers (Audiobook): 9781776194001

Release date

Audiobook: 19 January 2024