Journey to Jo'burg (Essential Modern Classics) (HarperCollins Children’s Modern Classics)

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Naidoo won the Josette Frank Award twice – in 1986 for Journey to Jo'burg and in 1997 for No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa. This is the story of love, commitment and the flowering of the human spirit against the background of South Africa's apartheid. For that work she won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.

The story is about two children, Naledi and Tiro, who are frightened that their sick baby sister, Dineo, might die. Knowing that only their mother will be able to help her, Naledi and Tiro travel to Johannesburg to find her.This has been awarded to Seven Stories in recognition of the museum’s national role in telling a comprehensive story of modern British children’s literature.

This material demonstrates just how meticulous Naidoo is in getting her stories and their message just right. Her involvement with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa led to her being imprisoned in solitary confinement for eight weeks at the age of 21. Banned by the apartheid government in South Africa, this is the story of two children’s courage and determination to find their mother and bring her home. She left for England in 1965 and studied at the University of York with the help of a United Nations Bursary, training to become a teacher. They need their Mma’s help to get Dineo to a hospital but Mma works and lives far away in Johannesburg.

Naidoo's collection covers a large proportion of her career and includes her PhD thesis, novels, short stories, picture books, professional and personal correspondence. Black children were sent to separate, inferior schools and their families were told where they could live, work and travel. Following Nelson Mandela’s prison release in 1991, the ban on the book was finally lifted in South Africa.

You may remember that we received Beverley Naidoo's collection early last year and almost as soon as it was unpacked and listed we took some of the Journey to Jo’burg files to a school in County Durham – you can read about the resulting event here . In The Great Tug of War and Other Stories she retells African folktales, the precursors of the Brer Rabbit tales. However Journey to Jo’burg soon found its way into many different countries, in English and in translations, so that hundreds of thousands of children elsewhere were soon reading it. Her 2007 novel Burn My Heart has an imagined point of reference in the boyhood in Kenya of a second cousin, Neil Aggett, being set in the 1950s during the Mau Mau Uprising. But apartheid South Africa is not a good place for two young black children to venture out alone, and they learn that life is much crueller in the city than in the small village they are used to.In 2004, she wrote the picture book papa,s Gift, set in contemporary South Africa, with her daughter, Maya Naidoo. Most of these drafts include extensive annotation, changes and significant developments which give us insight into how Naidoo works as an author. Walking is a very prominent feature in Beverley Naidoo's Journey to Jo’burg, a story that delivers a subtle and powerful message about apartheid South Africa. Fan mail is something that we would sometimes consider sampling (keeping only a representative selection of material), particularly when there is so much of it but Naidoo's fanmail, as well as being lovely to look at, is particularly interesting in terms of looking at social opinion and reaction to her work over the span of her career.