CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Ninety-four deaths - the high price of losing our humanity
'The men and women died from dehydration and diarrhoea and epilepsy… and a lack of care'
My mother had many faults. For one, she was fanatically Catholic (I use that word very loosely and from a petulant teenage girl point of view, as in Muuuuum, you’re such a fascist). My beloved mother, God rest her soul, was pious in a way that was … well… difficult for a teenage girl desperate to sow her oats, or eat them. I’m never quite sure what it is that girls do at that meant-to-be wild age. I never was, and all because of my mum. Her fear was that if she let go of her family she would lose her physical self and become air and float away as a cloud, vanishing when she lost her puff. So she clung to her children with a stifling grip that cut off our air supply; choked us; made us yearn for rivers to fjord and deserts to cross. Anything that put distance between her strangle hold. I thought I saw her knuckles turn white with the exertion of holding on. My mum was fearful in ways that had unexpected consequences. Thunderstorms turned into fearful signs of the wrath of God and my ...
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