When love defies every boundary society has built, how far would you go to claim what's yours? Rosa Lethlabe "walks on water". Widely admired for both her beauty and her brains, she is all the more exceptional for being a young
black woman in a white male-dominated world. As a highly successful executive in a Cape Town-based business firm she is far more than just a sop to black affirmative action - she is widely perceived to be on track to becoming the company's next CEO.
Despite being happily married, she is drawn into an obsessive love affair with a white female employee, whose death in childbirth creates life-changing dilemmas for Rosa, as she struggles to win the right to adopt the baby.
The story unfolds as a clash between unyielding social barriers inherited from an apartheid-era past and a dogged, equally-unyielding rebellion against all forms of discrimination stifling the present.
Love or Barbarism is a love story which raises questions about the meaning of love - not only about the pain and ecstasy experienced by lovers-in-love, and not only about fealty or devotion between partners in marriage, but also about the compulsive commitments which inevitably arise between parents and children.
