Читать книгу Tell Me Your Story - Ruda Landman - Страница 4

Over the course of forty years working as a journalist in South Africa, starting with Die Burger in Cape Town as a twenty-three-year-old, I have been struck time and time again by how widely divergent our experience of life in this country often is. Even people of more or less the same age – for example, John Kani and myself – have completely separate experiences, even though we have lived in the same country over the same period of time. How can we know each other, or understand the whole of our reality, if we don’t hear each other’s stories?

I was given a platform to do that by the life insurance company BrightRock. They run a website called The Change Exchange (www. changeexchange.co.za), which hosts discussions on “change moments” in life. They invited me to interview a veritable mosaic of South Africans for that platform, focusing on the paths they had followed, the choices they had made, how they had connected with their partners, how their children had changed their lives. External realities obviously shaped a large part of these stories. In the life of any South African over the age of around forty, our history and the transition to the new South Africa loomed large.

By the winter of 2017 we had done nearly sixty Change Exchange interviews, and thirty-nine for a kykNET programme called Verander­Dinge. I talked to artists and business people, celebrities and athletes, high-flying professionals and unsung heroes. Time and again I was struck by how quickly we forget, and by the infinite variety of individual experiences of a period we think we all know. Time and again I went home to reconsider my own life story, newly aware that it is only one thread in the tapestry of our history.

This is a selection from those conversations. I hope they will give you as much joy as they have given me and the team who put them together.

I have pruned the spoken language for easy reading and clarity, but the original meaning has not been compromised. The Afrikaans interviews for VeranderDinge have been translated.

Johannesburg, August 2017