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A lot can happen when a comfortable American lifestyle is purposely disrupted. The author was a middle-aged, conservative, Christian, Midwestern mom who embarked on an unexpected journey when she questioned her faith, left suburbia and moved across the world in search of a transformative spirituality.
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.
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.
Growing up in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s the emphasis on the way of life was completely different to the present day some nearly 70 years later.
He writes of his reminiscences of his school days and especially his involvement in sport which was compulsory. Many of life’s lessons were learnt young on the rugby or cricket fields.
