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.
