Sifiso Mzobe

Sifiso Mzobe is a South African author and was born and raised in the Durban township of Umlazi. He attended St Francis College in Mariannhill, then studied Journalism at Damelin Business Campus in Durban.He has worked for community newspapers and as a freelance journalist. His debut novel Young Blood (2010) won a number of awards, including the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, and was also listed in The Sunday Independent′s Top Ten Books of 2010 Quotes When I started writing this story, the characters and setting were very crisp in my mind. The proximity of Power, the shanty section, and the more developed section consisting of brick houses where Sipho lives is what you see in most Black townships of South Africa. People flock to townships from rural areas so they can be near job opportunities as townships are closer to cities. Shanty sections in townships spring from that, and they just keep growing. It’s been like that since I was very young. I witnessed the political civil war that ravaged Umlazi in the 1980s when I was a child. As a teenager I felt the palpable optimism that bubbled in Umlazi after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison at the dawn of the democratic South Africa. In my adult years I’m witnessing disillusion in my people as the promises made in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became our president remain unfulfilled. In Umlazi you find shanty sections, a few mansions, and a lot of four-room houses. Four-room houses were built by the apartheid government when they forcibly removed Black people from the cities. The term four-room is deceiving. It does not describe a house with four bedrooms—there are two small bedrooms, a small kitchen, a toilet, and another room. People from these different social classes co-exist in Umlazi Township. External links Category:Living people