Autor: Sindiwe Magona

Dr Sindiwe Magona: motivational speaker, author, poet, playwright, story-teller, and actor recently relocated to her home country, South Africa, after a successful career spanning more than two decades at UN Headquarters, New York, USA.Sindiwe Magona was born in rural Transkei and grew up in Gugulethu having moved from Blouvlei because of forced removals. The second of eight children and the eldest of the five girls, she experienced, first hand, the abbreviated childhood that is the plight of poor girl children the world over. Terribly ill prepared for meaningful entry into the world of work, Magona was a single parent by age twenty three. Left with three small children, she worked for four years as a domestic servant. How she overcame the dire poverty her husband»s abandonment plunged her into is the subject of the second part of her autobiography, Forced to Grow. But it is also the foundation of her belief that one»s station in life, at the time of birth, need not necessarily determine where one will end. From Bantu Education Teachers» Certificate that did not require matric, Magona boasts a Master»s degree from Columbia University and has had a successful career at the United Nations. Her work at the UN and her living in the US for more than two decades, her writing and the travel that has come her way through both work and the writing put Magona in the unique position of being both international in perspective and (because of her unflagging interest in and subsequent return to South Africa) fresh-eyed regarding the socio-political scene in South Africa.