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| Cynthia on Signal Hill, Cape Town, South Africa |
Four weeks
have past since I last stepped foot in Cape Town. In these four weeks I read a
fiction book called The Journey to Jo’burg by Beverly Naidoo. The story takes
place in the 1980s in South Africa. While reading this short novel I noticed
many similarities between South Africa then and now. The main character Naledi,
who is a black, notices her sister becoming increasingly ill and makes the
decision to embark on a journey to Jo’burg, which is about 300 kilometers away
just to inform her mother. The reason Naledi has to do this is because her
grandmother does not have the money to send the baby to the hospital and her
grandmother also does not want to worry Naledi’s mother while she is away at
work in the city.
One of the
similarities I noticed between South Africa then and South Africa now was the
trust people have in the community members. Naledi put her trust in people she
never met before to do things for her that if it was me in a similar situation
I would not have trusted those people. While I was in Cape Town, the people
around me made me feel like I was a member of their community even though they
really did not know me very well. I felt like that at Tafelsig Clinic and also
with most of the people I came in close contact with during my stay. This led
me to believe that is just the way people interact with each other in South
Africa. Besides trust, another theme that arises in this novel is poverty
amongst black people.
Naledi is classified black and comes
from a poverty stricken village. Her family depends on her mother who works in
the city for financial support. Naledi talks about how her family barely has
enough to get by. This related to South Africa today because the majority of
the poor people in South Africa are black. Driving by the townships in Cape
Town I could not help but notice that the people living there are all black.
This book made me realize that many of the things that were occurring during
the apartheid years are still continuing to happen today and although this is a
fictional story, everything that happened in this book could have actually
occurred.
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