Machona Son

This is a story narrated by Sketch, a third generation black immigrant child in South Africa in the 21st Century. It is a story of outsider, underdog immigrants' progeny's triumphs against adversity in their parents' new homelands. Sketch is grandson of a former migrant labourer from Zambia, Mr Chalanga Banda, and a Cape Coloured lady called Ms Jacobine Medina. After losing his parents before he was ten years old, Sketch's life became like a blindfolded roller coaster ride. He came to be rescued by a couple who would eventually adopt him, raising him as if he were their biological son. Sketch's adoptive parents, Mr and Mrs Jewels were South Africans of Indian origin. Upon successful completion of his high school studies, Mr and Mrs Jewels buy Sketch a car for a present. Before he could really absorb the significance of the present, Sketch is taken under the wings of Mr Murengu, founder and owner of their residential estate, Masuka Park, southern Johannesburg. Mr Murengu, a rather special kind of man, then, introduces Sketch to a whole new world of eccentrics, mysticism, science and technology, economic and political power. Through Mr Murengu, Sketch takes the reader on a journey commencing with the arrival of some of the earliest European settlers to find their way into inland South Africa in the 19th Century. After a dysfunctional upbringing in his black township in Soweto, Johannesburg, the younger Mr Murengu finds an unlikely brother, and new family, in Kobus Nel and his parents, Mr and Mrs Piet Nel. This was as white an Afrikaner family as could be in South Africa. But, Kobus had a view of the world that defied the racist and conservative ways of apartheid, much to the bewilderment of his parents. This relationship broke all the rules under the then apartheid laws in South Africa of the 1960s. However, the Nels and a circle of close friends and relatives had a hide-out on a remote farm south-west of Johannesburg. Here, with the arrival of young black Mhanza Murengu, it soon became such that apartheid laws that inhibited people's full expression and experience of freedom of being could no longer hold. Events on this farm would mark an even more profound turning point in the African boy's life. Sketch's story highlights the plight of black immigrant children in South Africa, starting with the challenges their own parents and grandparents had to endure in their earliest days in the country. In the South African urban context, the immigrants, often males, came not only from the neighbouring countries. They also included internally displaced South Africans originating from the poorest outlying rural areas of the country itself. People relate differently to racial and tribal debased discrimination and abuse. Nevertheless, many an immigrant child, regardless of the parents' origin and reasons for their migration, will have to take a stand at some point: should I stay, or should I go? In this story, staying for Sketch is no option; South Africa is his land. He was born and raised in the country. He has no relation to any other country than the land of his birth. South Africa is his home, and no one can take that away from him. Were he to he succumb to pressure from detractors to leave the country, just where would he go? Beyond racism, tribalism, discrimination, and xenophobia, the story delves on some aspects South African society has yet to come to grips with: child and adult sexual abuse, violence against women and those who are "different" by way of physical appearance and social conventions discrepancies in their behaviour. Other aspects needing attention are dread diseases such as HIV/ AIDS, gangsterism or organized crime, corruption, renewable energy, and equitable land redistribution. Although it is set in South Africa, this story is of global relevance as well. Do, please, buy the book; read, enjoy, and be inspired.