For those unfamiliar, I am a writer from South Africa. Born here and raised here.
Over the course of 5 posts, potentially more, I’ll share about me behind the pages. I will discuss what influenced me as a writer. I will also share how being South African influenced my writing.
My youth
During my teen years we transitioned from apartheid to the democracy we currently have. From a teenage point of view, life was simple. Everything had a specific path. Everybody followed that specific path. Stay in the lines and all was well. Very conservative and very religious. Also very racist. This one never rubbed off on me and I still don’t get it. No questions ever asked. No explanations ever given. Not to mention demanded. Just no. It was subtly taught in schools, from the pulpit, media, you name it. Looking back, the funny thing is that it doesn’t seem as if it ever crossed anybody’s mind to ask. Nobody seemed to question or go against the flow. It’s as if generations of propaganda just stumped out curiosity. It’s actually fascinating!
Transitioning from one governmental system went along with immense fear. I remember the intensely heightened emotions on all sides.
What a crazy time.
I loved our town library. I discovered the concept of libraries when I was elected to Media Center Prefect in standard 4 or grade 6! Fancy name for library duty and no lazy break in between classes. As prefect I learned how to pack the shelves. I organized the cards used to keep track of the books lent out. I also explored the absolutely fascinating world of fiction and non-fiction.
I read my way through our primary school library in those two years. Those were the two years that remained of my primary school years. I mourned the very well stocked library when I discovered the pathetically stocked high-school library.
Enter our town library.
It was nothing fancy or massive but it was amazing! I used my mom and dad’s names to get access to more books. I was limited to four books for a maximum of two weeks. It became exhausting to peddle to the library every second day to exchange the four books. It became worth the effort when I peddled to the library with 12 books every Friday.
Political side of my youth
At the time, I was completely ignorant and unaware of the political environment. I did not understand the impact of said environment on information, literature, music, movies, sports, education, and such. and the limitations we were actually living under.
So many prolific writers, journalists and others were living in exile. Their books, articles, plays and such were banned here and only available after democracy were established.
Our education was shaped around the ideologies of the leaders in our country. Therefore, history, literature, sciences and other subjects were taught with definite agendas and objectives.
It’s actually fascinating and ingenious! But very much part of all governmental systems.
Also exhausting. Can you imagine how closely all things had to be monitored? All the policing strategies that was in place to uphold the propaganda machine?
I believe in literature the dystopia genre explores this type of environment. An environment I, ironically, have no desire to explore in my stories! Isn’t that funny? Write what I know… maybe not.
**I promised myself to keep blog posts to no more than 500 words so I’ll end this post here.
Thanks for reading. Look out for the next post in this series where I’ll go into a little bit more detail about my writing
Cheers!
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