NEWS
BOOK OF THE WEEK: PROUD OF ME.
by Charlene Smith, Penguin R82

TWO years ago while living in England I showed my employer a copy of an article which Charlene Smith had written for the Observer. She read it then and there and, having finished it, promptly burst into tears.
The article was about Smith's own rape - as she puts it the day she became a statistic - the horrible statistic that a woman is raped in South Africa every 26 seconds.

A couple of years later and having returned to South Africa, Smith made me wish for a while that I hadn't. This is a country where young males phone a radio station to say that rape is no big deal, where we even have TV commercials telling real men that it actually isn't so cool to rape.

Reading Proud of Me into the early hours was a profoundly disturbing experience. Smith's story is so compelling, so brutally honest and ultimately so real that I read almost all of it in one night and early morning. Sleep didn't come easily.

Since her own ordeal, as we all know, Smith has fought back; writing endlessly, speaking, lobbying and, not infrequently, crossing swords with all manner of people from the president down, particularly over the vexed issue of Aids drugs.
That's the way she is: principled, dogmatic and certainly combative. Smith's personality, anger and steely determination blaze through this amazing book.
But so does a well of compassion that has touched the lives of hundreds of rape victims and inspired them to start rebuilding their shattered lives.

Their stories are not well known like Smith's but they are deeply, exquisitely poignant.

Maybe a man can never understand what it must be like to be raped but reading Proud of Me gave this one a slightly better idea.

Proud of Me is a riveting page-turner, a book whose importance it is impossible to underestimate. Peter Delmar

© Speak Out Terms of use