The Futile in Veil confronts the cost of silence
Lucy Kgweetsi | Monday August 11, 2025 12:29
The story centres around Naysa, a graduate in Animal Science, whose journey from hopeful academic to social outcast exposes the fault lines between personal agency and structural failure.
At the heart of the novel is a familiar yet often silenced reality: a young woman armed with qualifications, dreams, and ambition, but met with a stagnant job market and the unspoken pressures of economic instability. Mogapi does not exaggerate Naysa’s fall. She presents it in fragments, quiet moments of loss, delayed decisions, small compromises that eventually shift the course of her life.
Unable to secure work, Naysa finds herself pulled into a world she once looked down upon. Mogapi is careful not to reduce this shift to a cliché. Naysa’s choices are not framed as moral failings but as the result of a system that leaves little room for dignity when one is broke, female, and alone. The narrative moves with the quiet understanding that sometimes surviving is the only form of resistance available.
Eventually, there is a turning point when Naysa finds love and, later, marriage. For a moment, the narrative hints at redemption. But in a manner that mirrors real life, comfort proves fragile. Financial strain returns, and with it, the choices she thought she’d left behind. This part of the novel is particularly effective in showing how poverty is not always a one-time event; it cycles, re-emerges, and reshapes identity in the process.
Perhaps the most jarring moment comes when betrayal by a client spills Naysa’s secrets into the public domain. In an age of screenshots and digital scandal, the emotional violence of social media exposure feels relevant.
Mogapi captures the shame and public cruelty with an unsettling accuracy. As Naysa becomes the object of gossip and scorn, we are reminded of how quickly society distances itself from those it once claimed to embrace.
Mogapi’s writing is plain and deliberate. She does not embellish the diction with heavy prose or sentimentality. Instead, she allows scenes to speak for themselves. The dialogue is natural, the emotional beats understated, and the characters, even those in passing, feel real. This restraint allows the weight of the story to settle slowly but deeply.
What the novel does best is hold a mirror to society. It asks what happens when a person’s worth is measured only by reputation, and what is left when that reputation is destroyed? The Futile in Veil is not about triumph, but survival in a culture that often makes women the targets of both silence and noise.
This is a bold first offering from Mogapi. Without preaching, she forces the reader to sit with discomfort, not to condemn, but to understand. In doing so, she offers a necessary voice to the lived experiences many would rather ignore.