Reagan Jacobus LRC Oral History Project 10Th September 2008
1 Reagan Jacobus LRC Oral History Project 10th September 2008 Int This is an interview with Reagan Jacobus and its…the 10th of September (2008). Thank you. RJ And you’re in Durban. (Laughs.) Int I’m discombobulated, clearly! Reagan, on behalf of SALS Foundation, we really want to thank you for agreeing to participate in the LRC Oral History Project. I wondered whether we could start the interview, if you could talk about early childhood memories, growing up in South Africa under apartheid, and where you think your sense of social justice and injustice developed? RJ That’s…that’s an easy one. You know, growing up under apartheid it was…everything was political. Later, when I got to university, there was a man who taught us, who is quite a big man now, Jakes Gerwel, he was a professor of mine in Afrikaans and Dutch, and he used to say, in this country when you wake up in the morning and there’s no toothpaste, that’s a political statement (laughs) and you can drag it all the way back down to the economy and the situation of the family and all that, and yes, in one sentence, he…he put it together. But I was born in Marabastad, which no longer exists either, it’s a little township…well, not even a township, it was part of the greater Pretoria CBD and it was in fact a mixed…a racially mixed township. There’s a very nice book written by a man called Eskia Mphahlele, the title of which is ‘Down Seventh Avenue’.
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