minor reforms in an attempt to
quell international protest over the
atrocities and human rights abuses
of apartheid. Among those reforms
was the token hiring of black
workers in low-level white-collar
jobs. Like typists. Through an
employment agency she got a job as
a secretary at ICI, a multinational
pharmaceutical company in
Braamfontein, a suburb of
Johannesburg.
When my mom started
working, she still lived with my
grandmother in Soweto, the
township where the government
had relocated my family decades