Hello. My name is Shereen Pandit.
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa. - right at the tip of Africa, where the mighty Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. Long ago sailors who traveled from Europe to the East used to sometimes get caught up in a huge fight between the two oceans and then they’d call the tip of Africa “The Cape of Storms”. When the wind stopped howling and they could get fresh water and food for their journey, they called it “The Cape of Good Hope”.
I went to school and university on the slopes of a flat-topped mountain which guards the city. Some days the mountain has clouds on it and it looks like a table laid with a snowy white cloth, so of course it’s called Table Mountain. On clear days, you can look out from that mountain across the Bay at its foot, and see Robben Island in the distance. That's the island where Nelson Mandela, the first president of the new South Africa, was in jail for many years.
I always wanted to be a writer or a teacher, but everyone around me said: "Be a lawyer. We need lawyers. People are always getting into trouble with the government because we are struggling for our freedom and the government puts us in jail for this."
(I thought about how black families were broken up, with women and children sent to live in places where there was no work or food, while men were forced to do hard work on farms and in mines and getting treated worse than animals. I thought about the police always hitting and shooting and jailing black people for just being in places where the government said we couldn’t be. I thought about all the children starving because the government let bosses pay black parents too little to live on. I thought about all the beaches I’d never been able to walk on, the parks I couldn’t play in, the buses I couldn’t ride on, the schools I couldn’t go to, the university I had to have special permission to go to, because the government wouldn’t let me. Because I was black. I thought about all the young people like me who were getting arrested and hurt or even killed for protesting about these horrible things.)
So I became a lawyer. But I also wanted to struggle for our freedom, like other young people were doing. So I did. That got me into trouble with the government, so I had to come and live in Britain with my husband, where we could be safe.
I couldn’t be a lawyer in Britain, but I could still do things to help the struggle for black people’s freedom in South Africa. I could let British people understand how badly black people were treated by the government in South Africa and get them to help us..
One way to do that was through stories and poems. So I started writing some. Many of these were published in books and magazines and some of them won prizes. Unfortunately, most of my stories are for grownups, although I do have one or two written for children, which were published in a young people’s magazine called “Young Writer”.
I still live in London, but I travel to many countries to read my stories. I have a husband who is a teacher and a young daughter who is also a writer. Whenever I go to South Africa to visit friends and relatives, I see that now that we have a government we could all choose, the people live in a land of good hope - though the oceans still war with each other every so often.