As a part of writers fortnight, we had a teacher from our school come in and give a talk about growing up during a time when South Africa was racially segregated. As a result of South Africa being apartheid, everyone who wasn’t white was treated as minorities and didn’t have the same rights that the whites did. Ms Jones had moved to South Africa when she was 10 years old and didn’t face struggle much compared to the local people as she was white. During the apartheid movement, there was a major racial hierarchy present. Society was divided up into 4 sectors: the whites, the natives, the Indians, and everyone else was classified as the “coloureds”

In the talk with Ms Jones, she talked about three areas of apartheid South Africa: Bannings, Brutality and Boycotts. From what I have deducted from Ms Jones was particularly affected by the bans made by the government. Even though she was white with special privileges she couldn’t access television and media because they were highly restricted by the government. According to Ms Jones, anything that was defaming the government or going against the government was banned. There were even journalist and reported that attempted to cover the current news but they were put under house arrest for years at a time.

Another area that Ms Jones delved into was the brutality during her childhood days. In most cases, the brutality was what came after disobeying the banning and brutality back then was common. A student protest had resulted in the police opening fire, and from then onwards Ms Jones knew that there was lots of physical brutality for the smallest of reasons.

The third and final area Ms Jones delved into was boycotts. An example that she brought up was that South Africa was banned from the Olympics due to it being an Apartheid nation. People and other nations started to boycott things that the South Africans cared about. The South Africans are very passionate about sports, and when no country wanted to play them in cricket, it had a huge impact on the country. Another boycott was that other countries would not buy South African product and this meant that the economy was heavily damaged. In additions, investors and other nations stopped funding South African businesses. All of this collectively helped in bringing an end to the Apartheid South Africa.

Towards the end of the discussion, Ms Jones mentioned very briefly thing she felt very strongly about : justice, being fair, and being a bystander. All of these three thing go hand in hand together, as in order to be fair and bring justice to the people, you can’t be a bystander to the things happening around you. Finally to finish of this thought-provoking discussion she said ” the times that you grow up in really shape your values”

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According to Ms Jones, her family had to listen to the “real news” through a media service that broadcasted from the shores of Johannesburg. She also stated that though television had come in the 1930s to the rest of the world, in South Africa television had only come in 1976 due to the Apartheid movement.