Gags, Quirks and Facts
This is an unusual little book. In a South Africa in economic trouble with daily power outages and a 60% youth unemployment rate, we might think there’s not much to smile about. Don’t you believe it!
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This is an unusual little book. In a South Africa in economic trouble with daily power outages and a 60% youth unemployment rate, we might think there’s not much to smile about. Don’t you believe it!
Covid-19 amplified the seismic rumblings of South Africa’s divided society. Out of the limelight and away from corruption scandals, a vast network of civil society organisations mobilised as the pandemic approached. They harnessed the thunder, directing attention to people who are usually not seen or heard – compelling the nation to take a long, hard look at itself.
Civil Society’s Care and Creativity in South Africa’s Covid storm
LOVE AFFAIRS CAN INDUCE STEEP LEARNING CURVES.
This certainly happens to Margret Hansen, a young nursery school teacher living in a country town in post-war Germany, but longing for a broader stage upon which to live her life. Her wish seems to come true when, unexpectedly, she falls in love with a wealthy man from out of town. He opens her eyes to a glittering world beyond the drudgery of her provincial lifestyle and the home she shares with her mother and grandmother. But the stars in her eyes turn to tears when she discovers that she has become pregnant. Now she is forced to face herself, to untangle many dilemmas and to make some life-altering decisions.
One day I suddenly thought, “My goodness, where’s Gareth?” So, I started looking. Last I heard, he was working with the British Army in Iraq, doing long stints: I tracked him down to prison cell in Kuwait. He had been used as a drug mule, nabbed and sentenced to death by hanging. His death was commuted to life and then further reduced to 15 years. When I located him, he had already been inside for four years. Thereafter I sent him a letter, every month, for 67 consecutive months. My Letters to Kuwait, were received by Gareth on his hidden device: news and comment on life in South Africa, my reflections on humanity and our world.
From skylarking at school to a professorship at the best university in Africa. It's all here in this collection of loosely related memoir-essays: all twists in the winding road the author travelled to become a female computer science professor at the University of cape Town. Born and schooled in the Netherlands, Ms Keet didn't stay home for long. Her winding road had a distinctly international flavour. She has worked and studied in Ireland and Italy, and briefly in Peru and Cuba, before finding her way back to South Africa. The author herself says of her essays: ' They offer a peek into a kitchen where underway is making of a woman into an academic scientist when the yeast has been gender-spiked against her chances of rising.'
When a twenty-nine year-old Indian immigrant arrives from Zanzibar to a cold and bleak post-war London in 1946, he hadn’t expected on finding a mummified corpse in the East End building in which he’d intended to set up shop. Unable to unravel the mystery of the corpse and fearful for his future, he hatches fantastical plans to get rid of it, with unexpected consequences.
He hadn’t planned on romancing the dead man’s nice niece either…
DIVORCE IS THE MOST STRESSFUL JOURNEY … We’re forced to search into the deepest corners of our hearts to rediscover ourselves.
At 24, the author was a single mother struggling to survive while she went through her own divorce. Her ordeal left her bruised but it did not break her.