Financial
Security is a team sport. The former Mayor of South-Central Durban, Theresa Mthembu,
invited me to her home in 1996. It was the first time I had been to Umlazi. I
grew up along the route of the Comrades Marathon which winds its way from
Durban to Pietermaritzburg. I was in the White bits. The other bits were
further from the main artery. I spent two years in the UK in ‘98/’99 and moved
here again in 2008. To me, in my “English Speaking World” bubble, it is irrelevant
whether what separates me from poverty is the valley of a thousand hills or the
hills of Oxfordshire and then the Atlantic Ocean. Racism was never a “South
Africa Problem”. Apartheid was never a South Africa problem. We are all
connected. We just create artificial divisions that allow us to live in bubbles
of self-determination. I can’t unsee that visit as a 16-year-old. But the
system we live in didn’t change that day. Just my personal practice of
dismantling it. Starting the only way I can. With myself. Every day. For the
rest of my life.
Dismantling Apartheid is a Marathon
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