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I am a Coloured woman of South Africa. The blood flowing through me was despised by apartheid, for it was not pure and it was not White. Because of this, I struggled with feelings of self-doubt and shame.
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.
That was how it had been with her marriage.
Say ‘yes’ and the road would take you. Say ‘yes’, say ‘yes’. The road had taken him right through to the end of his life and she had completed the circle with him.
It had been rugged in places and the tyres had worn thin. But in the end it had been a complete journey. A lifetime.
A shared incarnation. She had said ‘yes’ and travelled with him to the last breath. There is a last. She had been with him. And then her incarnation continued without him.
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.
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.
