This is the story of a little boy growing up in in a big Lebanese family in Mayfair, in Johannesburg, 60 years ago. It tells of his relationship with his mom, whose deep faith gave her the fearless courage to face injustice. This inspired a spiritual journey which led him from fighting bullies at school to becoming a young revolutionary fighting apartheid.

As a young man facing difficult contradictions of life under apartheid, he and his friends courageously took action to narrow the contradictions between life’s struggles in the light of their faith. With the idealism of youth, they had a curiously certain sense that God carried them forward on an unstoppable wave.

His story vividly illustrates how he grew up from a naïve, yet loving childhood, through the fires of divorce, deaths and broken political promises fracturing trust. Can lives inspired by faith restore compassion with the poor and act again to respond to their suffering?  Could this be a time of Kairos in our country’s growth to a more ‘critical loyalty’: from the innocence of our freedom in 1994, through the wasted years of state-capture, to the resurrection of a more mature political reorder?

Aluta Continua