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.

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.

Television came late to apartheid South Africa. By the early 1980s the state-owned broadcaster was ready to expand the network to include the black majority. There were sound economic and propagandist reasons for this.  Msibi was among those recruited to be trained as technicians, journalists, and cameramen. The irony was that this enterprise coincided with the sustained popular uprising that finally led to the end of white minority rule. So the new generation of black television journalists went back into their own townships and ‘homelands’ to record, like no-one else could, the rising resentment and the reciprocal repressions that characterised large swathes of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s.