Review of A World Apart (1988) by Haydn W — 11 Nov 2007

The story of Gillian Slovo has always been very dear and close to my own troubled heart and life as an activist, for as she had this unfufilled relationship with her almost absentee father, so has my daughter had a similar one with me - for the same reasons.

Now, some twelve years after South Africa's first "free" and democratic elections in 1994, still does my daughter's mother accuse of of not making the right choices; nothwithstanding  the fact, that her own brother - albeit married at the time, was constantly uprooting his wife and young children to flee the impending wrath of South Africa's feared SB's and BOSS.

Still to this day, do I feel the struggle to be an ongoing one, for many of us activists whose lives were torn assunder by the ignonomy of that barbaric regime, are still disenfranchised - sadly living in the diaspora. Yes indeed, I have lost the most valuable years of my daughter's life; her birth, education, upbringing and emergence into womanhood. How I have wished - over an over again that things could have been different. However, these lost years can never be regained, for life has a very cruel way of dealing out the cards ...

So my question to you is; were we/are we still so wrong for having been dedicated enough to make those sacrifices of refusing to remain non-plussed - refusing to shut our eyes to the ugly reality and horror that the majority of South Africans faced - remaining non-beings; or are we (like so few today) to be recognised and respected for the precarious choices we made - regardless of the privilege and comfort we could have enjoyed?

I have resigned myself to that maxim of old; "Damned if you do; damned if you don't"?