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.