MEMOIRS OF A BORN FREE

On 19 October 1991, Malaika Lesego Samora Mahlatsi was born at the Meadowlands Community Clinic, one year and eight months after Mandela's release from prison. The Nationalist Party was still in power, but everyone knew that its grip on political power would draw to an inevitable end sooner rather than later. Memoirs of a Born Free is a journey back through the life of Malaika Wa Azania as she recounts the experience of growing up through the end of apartheid and South Africa's transition into a democratic nation. She was not born during the times of constitutionalized apartheid but is still a product of an epoch of systematic individualized apartheid. Her story is not a reflection of freedom; it is an epitome of the ongoing struggle for liberation and emancipation from mental slavery. The struggle of the generations before that of the Born Frees was a struggle for political freedom and democracy and was the foundation for revolution and reform but not the ultimate goal. Malaika contests the notion of the born-free generation when it is a generation that was born in the midst of a struggle for economic freedom and the quest for the realization of the objectives of the African Renaissance. The book's purpose is to give an alternative narrative to the existing one that suggests that Malaika's is a generation of apolitical and desensitized people.

Malaika Wa Azania is an activist devoted to pursuing the African Renaissance agenda, the founder of the pan-Africanist journal, African Voices of the Left, and a columnist for the Thinker magazine. She is the secretary general of the African Youth Coalition, an umbrella organization of all the youth society organizations throughout the African continent, and the director of her own writing company, Pen and Azanian Revolution (Pty) Ltd.

BORN FREE
Mein Leben im Suedafrika nach der Apartheid
Deutsch von Antje Papenburg
[PB: Rotpunkt, 02/16]