Nun and the Pig: Tales from South Africa
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A01=Treive Nicholas
Author_Treive Nicholas
Biographies & Memoirs
Category=DNC
Category=NHTB
Cultural History
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
History & Criticism
Journals & Letters
Social & Cultural Anthropology
Social History
Product details
- ISBN 9781398106772
- Weight: 523g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2021
- Publisher: Amberley Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1980, while Nelson Mandela languished in jail, an enthusiastic and hopelessly naïve British teenager arrived at a local school in Mandela’s home state of Transkei. Wide-eyed and faced with an unfamiliar world, Treive Nicholas was about to embark on an adventure he would never forget.
Looking back on this year forty years later, A Nun and the Pig offers a remarkable insight into this politically charged but little-known part of Africa and a lived experience ranging from the surreal to the heart-warming; the wonderful to the tragic. One minute Nicholas could be entertaining local Thembu chiefs or coaching the Transkei paraplegic sports team for a rare non-racial sporting competition, the next he could be witnessing the terrible death of an infant in a neglected Umtata township.
Scrapes with law enforcement agencies increased in frequency and risk as Nicholas railed against the injustices of the apartheid system, and at one point found himself smuggling Communist black liberation literature across South Africa’s borders. Armed only with a camera and bag of dried apricots, his hitchhiking adventures took him thousands of kilometres north to Zambian bush, where events took a dangerous turn near one of Robert Mugabe’s camps.
Fear, shock, joy and self-discovery were a daily experience in this forgotten corner of South Africa, where humour and kindness flourished amid grinding poverty and brutal racism. The friendship of a wise and feisty nun kept Treive Nicholas on course, opening his eyes to a side of life unfamiliar to a former milkman from suburban England. Her car, ‘the Pig’, was a trusty but temperamental companion.
Over the years Treive Nicholas has been stalked by a Jaguar in the Amazon, charged at by a rhino in Namibia, corralled by Oryx in the UAE and come eye-to-eye with bull sharks on the ocean floor of Mexico. In 1980 he spent time in apartheid era South Africa. 'A Nun and the Pig' is his first book.
