Marina’s Reviews > Touch My Blood: The Early Years > Status Update

"For so many of us the past is a place of hurt, and, in a sens, this book is my own private Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I've tried to account for what I did, and had done to me. I've tried to make peace with that which I cannot change about myself. I survived the old country and belong to the new one. I am grateful for that. Many did not make it."

I don't want this to end...

"But at school they don't tell us about the people you've just mentioned."
"School doesn't hold all the answers to life; it doesn't hold the answer to literary wisdom. Go the library and find out."

"For the life of my ancestors, why do your teachers tell you that poetry can only be written in archaic English. Thee, thou, thy, thine. What rubbish is this. Is this what Fole teaches you?"
"But Shakespeare writes like that. So does Blake and TS Eliot."
He looked at me. "Have you heard of Soyinka? Oswald Mtshali? Chris van Wyck? Why do you tell me about dead white men ?

We are scared to find out what black people are thinking, that's why the white government has declared a lot of black leaders unquotable in our news papers. We don't want to know."

"Streamlining was a common practice, a form of "punishment". It wasn't considered rape. Rape was associated with physical violence and force. Streamlining was about control. A man must control his women. Girls could be streamlined for drinking, simply to teach them a lesson. And the girls never reported it. I suspect they felt no one would believe them, because being streamlined stigmatised you."

"In the chaos of the times, monks from the Mariannhill Mission took away Zulu women from polygamous marriages and accomodated them in a home at the mission. The African had to be rid of his heathen ways, which included praying to his ancestral gods and taking many wives. The African had to be taught that it was his duty to serve the white master. The African had to be taught that he could not own land."