BrightLights@BookBuddy

'I guess the best place to start a story is at the beginning. My name is Lindiwe Hani. I was born on 27 December 1980 to Limpho and Martin Thembisile Hani. My father was also known as Chris. My parents named me Lindiwe, which in isiXhosa means ''the daughter we have waited for''. In that year, a leap year, the world's population sat at 4 434 682 000, the Voyager 1 space probe confirmed the existence of a moon of Saturn that was to be named Janus (or Janusz) - how's that for prophetic - and Robert Mugabe was elected president of Zimbabwe.'  It took me a day and some to get over reading Lindiwe Hani's autobiography, Being Chris Hani's Daughter , because I desperately wanted to hang on to the fuzzy feeling of being a confidant to its brave author that developed as I read the book. This is precisely why some biographies are pure magic. They take the reader behind the scenes of major socio-political events and in the process, create a sense of t...

' 'And on this Christian holiday, Good Friday, the whole of South Africa became aware of the existence of Griekwastad. It all started when a fifteen-year-old boy named Don Steenkamp sped into town in his father's white Isuzu double-cab and screeched to a halt in front of the town's almost deserted police station. It was shortly before 19h00 when Don jumped out of the vehicle, dressed in black rugby shorts and a T-shirt, and ran into the station's charge office covered in blood...'' As a creole of African and European descent myself, Griekwastad ('Griquatown' in English) is a place of immense historical significance. Although South African history books still refer to them as 'bastards' (persons of multicultural heritage), the Griquas had been among the first of many groups of creole peoples to abandon European Dutch society at the Cape of Good Hope and, under the leadership of captains, migrated further inland to free themselves of coloni...