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What if I had told you that the mechanism of your brain is like plasticine and could be moulded to your own unique set of beliefs and hence abilities? Could you afford not to even try to step into a new reality? Would you dare?
Many thousands of South African children are brought up by their grandmothers. This is one of the many manifestations of an unstable and distraught society, where the mother to child bond is too often broken, causing pain and a deep-seated sense of loss to both parties. Each Gogo-raised child’s story is different, but the general theme is the same: it deals with abandonment, with only qualified acceptance, but most of all with the simple absence of a real mother presence. The title of Vanessa Neo Mathope’s book – Orphaned, with Living Parents – tells it all. A monstrous imbalance has occurred, and the consequences run deep.
The small Island of St Helena, flung away in mid-South Atlantic Ocean, is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world – its loneliness breeding a phlegmatic populace as famous for friendliness as the island itself is known for stunning scenery and a captivating history.
Small wonder, then, that the author – in love with St Helena from an early age – resolved to buy a second family home there in 1999, and found herself living there for nearly ten years while her family “commuted” back and forth from Cape Town on the RMS St Helena - the only ship that serves the island.
Television news – which has played a crucial role in the world’s most momentous events, from wars and royal weddings to mankind’s first steps on the moon – is in the midst of a digital-fueled revolution. In the early years, TV news was monopolised by large corporations and state broadcasters, who controlled what went on air and when. Then technological advances in the 1980s enabled billionaires like Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch to muscle in and beam 24-hour news channels across the world via cable and satellite.
BEING BLACK AND BI-POLAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
‘My struggles with mental illness were in some ways like a child crying out for attention; more than that they were a cry for help from the mind I felt trapped in. There was a darkness in me that many times swallowed me whole.’
This is how Keamogetswe Bopalamo introduces her account of her troubled early life. It is an intensely personal account, and yet it speaks to a reality much broader than itself. In the exciting whirl of South Africa’s post-apartheid society, there is this darker side: the confusions, the fears, the rebellions, the degradations and emotional pain.
