SOPHIATOWN – Xoliswa Skomolo has donated the first published batch of her book Born to Belong Nowhere, to her church in Sophiatown.
Skomolo grew up in various towns in the Eastern Cape. “I have been a voracious reader of all kinds of literature throughout my life, but I have not written a book for publication before, except academic papers in academic journals of education, which is my field.
“I have donated the first 10 copies of my book to my church, Christ the King, as a way of saying thank you to my God for the long and healthy life he has given to me already, and for protecting me as I wandered around the world not even caring to guard my own life.”
She was inspired by a number of issues when writing the book “Firstly, the observation that our past is fast fading into oblivion. The young generations are beginning to know less and less about the history of our past. Even the schools place no emphasis on the kind of life the ancestors of current schoolchildren lived during the apartheid years.
“Secondly, how we are fast losing out on our storytelling culture, which passes down stories of the past from generation to generation. Young people today are so consumed by technology that they have no time to listen to stories from parents and grandparents. Stories told in book form will always be there for them to read as they grow older.”
According to Skomolo, “The realisation is that most books written about our liberation struggle are about the lives of the leaders of the struggle. Not much is told about the lives of the rank and file, and grass root freedom fighters. Whereas, their stories are extraordinary fillers of gaps in the big story of the evolution of our nation. Seeing the rapidity with which the life of our people has changed in the last 40 years or so, I saw a need to document this change. There is a perception that we blacks do not write books to tell our stories as we know them. So, I decided to start with my own story as it represents all black people of my generation and their struggles through apartheid oppression.”
She concluded that she has already started writing another book. “Not about me this time, but about general experiences of our people of living in apartheid times.”
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