An Underground Colony of Summer Bees

“Sanya Osha is one of the boldest and most distinctive voices in African writing today”.

“His writing is akin to a poetic trance that manages to convey an unexpected and taunting fragile beauty”

"The novel is blunt, eager to call a spade a spade. Scenes of crimes and of sex come with lucid and elaborate descriptions, a desire to show it as it is. It is also well researched, with all the slangs falling into their appropriate places. Osha is incapable of being unpoetic, and as such the novel itself can boast of being a long poem. Also characteristic of Osha, there is a sustained attempt to philosophise street life, some of it, heavy-handed, standing in the way of the narrative flow. Perhaps the overall importance of this novel is that it offers a window to glimpse at what many commentators on post-Apartheid South Africa have seen as the alarming rate of crimes in the society."   

"What the novelist inevitably paints as evil is the pointless force of a society and a world that compels ordinary people into extraordinarily complex forms of negation. In a world of slippery values and powerful transitions, we all become complicit. Nothing better illustrates the contradiction than the character Babongile..."