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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?
Gabriel Kutama, an elderly illegal from across the border, is mugged at a Soweto taxi rank. He ends up at the house of Portia, a single mother who tends to his bruises. She allows him to stay on in a room at the back of her house.
But Gabriel is no ordinary man, for he is the former President of the country north of the South African border, presumed dead after a military coup. His wife has fled to London with their three children.
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.'
Speaking as I Want is the outcome of conversations between a father (lecturer) and a daughter (student) on life and living in a period of intellectual uncertainty within and outside of universities. It seeks to provoke wider reflection on the way we live and the narratives that currently influence us.
‘Mama…where is my Daddy?’
As a single mother Thuli has always tried to do her best for her daughter, living each day with the legacy of her past. But even she may not be able to give Lesedi the one thing she really needs. Unless life with its unexpected twists and turns finds a way to provide.
A tale of love and lies, hopes and dreams.
From the author of Gabriel’s Apology.
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.
