In these remarkable letters, beginning in 1949, between a black South African girl in her teens and an elderly British woman educator (the third woman, a black South African social worker, is a subsidiary player) a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding is played out against the background of advancing apartheid and, with it, "Bantu education." Like the troubled young student here, South Africa's educated (and Christianized) blacks were systematically deprived of a place they could call home.