Answers for all your questions
was rejected and he was arrested in 2013.)
Ana, from DRC: “A few days ago my SIM card didn’t work anymore. I went to get a new one [but] without a valid South African ID I couldn’t get one.”
While the book also includes documented accounts by more privileged individuals who came to South Africa to get a better education and seek a better life (which most have achieved), the overriding feelings unpacked here are those of severe displacement.
Luc from the DRC: “Life in Cape Town is not a piece of cake but a tough nut to crunch.”
The Scalabrini Centre, founded in 1994, has helped many foreigners to adapt to their new lives, teaching them English and trying to ease their severe issues of finding their feet with a “Welcoming Programme”, helping with integration and explaining the complicated and costly procedure of getting visas.
Melanie Govinda, director of the Centre, said at the launch: “We are working against the idea that migration is a scourge. We need to change the current rhetoric of an ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Ideologically we need to focus on a humanity that rejects the human construct of borders.”
The refugees’ harrowing stories made a deep impact on the audience at the launch, with one saying “As a South African I feel very ashamed of xenophobia”.
Brody commented: “This is the story of incredibly brave people. We ought to have a common humanity in not fearing refugees, but rather helping them.”
Govinda added: “We are hoping this is not a once-off project… We really want to get the people we help to use this as a platform to share their stories.”
The book costs R250 at the Scalabrini Centre or the Book Lounge. E-mail inmyshoesza@gmail.com CURIOSITY may have its perils, but without this essential ingredient we humans would still be little more than hairy bipeds. It’s our immense curiosity that has led to all of our discoveries, inventions (and not a few early deaths)!
This book, loaded with the kind of queries that you didn’t even know you wanted to ask, is the result of almost four decades of collected knowledge in the fields of nature, physics and space, that the RSG radio programme
has been sharing with listeners for close to four decades.
Why don’t bees fly over water? And what happens if they need to, in urban places? (They fly over bridges – incredible, but there it is).
Why do blue-eyed people seem to have weaker eyes? Well, they don’t, but they are more sensitive to light and therefore dark-eyed people make better night drivers.
Can birds move backwards? How do birds flying in a flock in the same direction manage to avoid colliding when they all swerve in the same direction? Do you know that we only see one side of the moon? Yet the moon rotates on its own axis – so why should that be?
Many of these queries may seem to be common sense; yet others are far more technical. They are all answered here with wisdom, clarity and often a degree of wit.
is a “fascinator” of a read, and will tease and please the casual and/or dedicated reader. It is also available in Afrikaans as and was translated into English by Louise Vorster.