KUMI Naidoo’s Letters to my Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker simultaneously jerks tears, pricks laughter and puffs the chest with pride.
The much-anticipated memoir of his early years published this week by Jacana is a journey through love, loss, tenacity, triumph, despair, hope and relentless activism for social, economic and environmental justice.
The story starts in Chatsworth, an apartheid-segregated Indian labour reservoir township, and stretches to the global stage.
In a simple home in Unit 2, at first “the fabric of family” was shattered by his mother’s suicide when Kumi was just 15, and with three other siblings.
He writes poignantly of that traumatic episode: “Her death acted as a catalyst for my already growing political awakening; shortly afterward I became deeply immersed in the struggle against the…
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Post (Digital) - 1 Issue, 2022-11-02