Judith Bogod

Act of Redemption Judith Bogod

The true story of a British housewife, her spouse and kids temporarily located in South Africa during the Apartheid era. Gone are the grey skies of London replaced now by skies of endless blue. Gone is cooking, making beds, vacuuming, laundry, walking the kids to school. Now, a black maid lives in a concrete 4 x 6 room off the kitchen, a bucket for a toilet, a cold-water shower. Somewhere about is the garden boy - no not a boy a black man of 40. The 'boy" polishes the family shoes, unloads the groceries, mends the fuses, washes the cars. Later, the two will eat dinner of mealie meal, gristle and bone that has been steaming all day on the kitchen stove. For white South Africans, it is the most luxurious, opulent society in the world. For this British housewife, it could have been the life of riley, frivolous, utterly delightful, nothing to do but play golf, make macramé, paint her nails. It would have been easy to just go along with it, enjoy it, but if you had an ounce of conscience, you felt the pain of the harsh, brutal, conditions of the two black people under your roof and the three million others, living in abject poverty, deprived of all human rights, subjugated to serve the whims of white supremacist South Africans. Told with pathos and humor, this is history from a different perspective