All those lesson on writing letters…for jobs as servants…always writing how good they were at cooking, cleaning, washing, gardening…always ending with “Yours obediently.”

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-02-09 11:01:29 Associated-names Joyner, Jane Boxid IA40058521 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Fiction is a very good way of exploring reality, especially different viewpoints. I tend to do a lot of research before I create a story and characters that are fictional. So my stories are true in the sense that everything that happens could happen. That was why at the beginning of Journey to Jo’burg there are two press cuttings about real children who made incredible journeys to find their mothers.My knowledge about South Africa until reading this YA book? Roger Federer has some connections with the country (wiki: his mother is from there); Nelson Mandela; Charlize Theron; 2010 FIFA World Cup (vuvuzela...); of course apartheid. But this was pretty much it. (I know of some famous writers from the country, but never read any of them. Yes.) I start with writing notes on scraps of paper as well as beginning a notebook. This is my ‘first ideas’ stage. When researching, I talk to people, visit places, take photographs, read and so on. Burn My Heart, for instance, came out of two visits to Kenya. The seeds of the novel began to emerge during my first visit. By my second visit, I was much more focused, wanting to see particular landscapes, places and people. By this stage I was already thinking about my plot. Although my plot may change a bit as I write, it is important for me to have a sense of the shape of the whole story and how I intend to tell it. Afterwards comes the actual writing – usually draft after draft! Then editing – by myself and with my editor. I often ask a few people to whom I have spoken while researching if they will read my story and comment. This helps me get a bit of distance from what I’ve written. Altogether, it’s a long slow process – but very satisfying in the end. The sun rose higher. On they walked. The heat sank into them and they felt the sweat on their bodies. On they walked. Alone again… My first illustrated response to Journey to Jo’burg in 1985, thanks to a schoolboy Jeffrey Cooper so simple and straightforward that it makes accessible even to quite young children the difficult and the profound. After going with a friend to a restaurant in Frankfurt, even though it was raining like crazy, it did not stop me from going to Oxfam, where I did behave: I only got this one book (1 euro).

Don't underestimate this short and easy read.I actually almost have up on it because this first time I tried reading it I got confused by the characters and went to sleep! I tried again tonight and I read the whole thing in one sitting! I like to hear from adults too and was heartened when a Kenyan writer told me how he had been gripped by Burn My Heart: … read it in one sitting, so suspenseful was it. I particularly lauded and applauded the way you seemed to make mirror images of conflicting viewpoints on BOTH sides of the divide. The next day, Naledi and Tiro travel with Mma by train to their village. At Naledi’s asking, Mma tells how hard her life is. Once in the village, Nono watches Tiro, and Mma and Naledi take Dineo to the hospital. They must wait all day to see the doctor. After Dineo is kept in the hospital for three days, Mma is able to take her home. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.11 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000229 Openlibrary_edition

Curriculum

I can only guess because the government didn’t give any reasons. One likely reason was that half of the book’s royalties were going to a banned organisation, the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, that was helping the families of political prisoners. Beverley Naidoo (a white child) got a vaccine against diphteria, the children of the woman helping her family did not get this chance... Why shouldn’t we use the bus? When our buses are full, their buses are half empty. Don’t you be sorry!” (p. 26). But those children who marched in the streets don’t want to be like us...learning in school just how to be servants. They want to change what is wrong...even if they must die!

urn:lcp:journeytojoburg0000naid:epub:e62c6049-886d-406c-b0c1-e0ee7667cf32 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier journeytojoburg0000naid Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9r312z0w Invoice 1652 Isbn 0582058295 At Grace’s house in Soweto, Naledi learns about the Soweto riots. Thousands of school children demonstrated against what they were being taught in their schools. Their subjects were cleaning, washing, cooking and gardening. Their schools trained them to be servants. When they demonstrated, the police shot many of them. Some died, some were wounded, and some were arrested. There also was tear gas, and many public buildings were burned. Grace’s brother eventually left South Africa for an education. He hopes to return to fight for their freedom. Outside of the village, they meet a boy who works in an orange orchard. He lets them eat a few oranges and hides them in a shed for the night. They leave early the next morning so as not to anger the orchard’s owner. At the end of Out of Bounds (where each story is set in a different decade) there is a factual time line giving real events and an interested reader can explore connections. If you have read The Help, this is an equivalent book for children. The period is South Africa's apartheid years, and while I'm rating four for writing, I'm rating another star for the depiction of tendencies towards popular activism and bringing about change. I also like that there is a simple map.Another baby has died in the village and Naledi knows that her little sister Dineo might die too. But what can she do? Their grandmother has no money and there are no doctors in their village. So Naledi makes up her mind. She will have to get Mma who works more than 300 kilometres away in Johannesburg. The only way to let her know was to get to the big road and walk. So Naledi and her brother Tiro did just that… was one of the first books to portray life as it actually was in apartheid South Africa. Both then as contemporary fiction and now as a historical novel, it tells the story of children who must show enormous courage in the face of injustice

Before they leave, Naledi’s friend Poleng gives them sweet potatoes to eat on their trip. She also agrees to tell Nono where they’ve gone once they’re safely away. Naledi and Tiro don’t want Nono and Mmangwane to be angry with them or keep them from going. I found this book humbling and heartwarming. It is written from the viewpoint of two young children in South Africa who struggle to understand the injustice they and their families face. When their baby sister falls gravely ill they courageously decide to travel 300km from their small village to Johannesburg to summon their mother from work. The physical journey is symbolic of their awakening to the wider realities of apartheid; they face danger and experience prejudice, but also meet kind strangers who help to keep them safe and tell them stories about the uprising of students in Soweto.

The similarities between the lives of Femi and myself left me wondering. Wondering how two people can be so similar, wondering about how you know so much about what young boys are going through…

When I sent two copies of my first children’s book to nephews and nieces in South Africa in 1985, they never received the parcel. Instead, my sister-in-law received a letter telling her that the books had been seized and banned. However Journey to Jo’burg soon found its way into many different countries, in English and in translations, so that hundreds of thousands of children elsewhere were soon reading it. It was only after the release of Nelson Mandela from jail that the book was unbanned. Naledi is upset by everything she has heard and seen, but she is also grateful that she is learning so much about her mother and her world. Published during the height of Apartheid in the mid-1980s, this book was banned in South Africa until 1990. This would be a wonderful book to use to help students think globally about issues of power and class. It could also be the basis for doing a comparison between Apartheid and segregation in the U.S.