Cancer: This time it came for me:
One moment your life is trudging along with its regular rhythms and the predictability necessary to provide stability for the people entrusted to us. And then, in a moment, it all changes. A hole opens up in the ordinary flow of life and you fall through it.
At the end of 2024 I went for a routine mammogram. After the technician was done with the mammogram I went into a different room to wait for the doctor, a radiologist, to come do the breast sonar. All routine.
The radiologist came in with the technician. She was there to make me feel comfortable so I wasn’t alone with my breasts out with only a male doctor in the room. The doctor told me that they had seen some calcification in the mammogram on my left breast which had not been there two years ago when I had done my last mammogram. He said that something was irregular, but not necessarily wrong, and that I should have a biopsy done. It could be, he warned, that something was brewing.
The second I heard the words calcification and biopsy I felt that hole opening again. In 2023 I lost Mbali, my beautiful precious daughter, at the age of 12, to complications related to treatment she had to endure for leukaemia, including chemotherapy, radiation and a bone marrow transplant from her sister. My family has no history of cancer, neither does my former husband’s, who died from multiple sclerosis last year. My daughter’s cancer was one of those childhood cancers that no one seems able to explain.
My first thought was that my turn had come as a result of the stress of our long struggle with my daughter’s illness and her eventual passing as we sang her into her transition in a hospital ward.
The biopsy was scheduled for later that week. In the three days between the mammogram and the biopsy I had to come up with R10 000 for the biopsy. My medical aid paid for the mammogram as they considered it a “preventative measure” but the further investigation of a biopsy — that was for my own pocket unless I still had medical savings in my medical aid.
That was not going to be the case; the medical aid for Nandi, my surviving daughter, and I is about R14 000 a year. But, in 2024, our medical savings were already almost R5 000 less because, when you have a family member that dies before a year is up and your medical savings are already used up, the medical aid “recoups” the portion spent on the member that has passed.
The accounts from the optometrist, dentist, physiotherapist, psychologist and the GPs quickly rack up. By the time April comes the medical savings are long gone. The monthly payments for medical aid are invaluable if you end up in hospital but they don’t get you through an ordinary year, and not at all when you fall through the hole of a serious disease. Even though they do help with hospital bills you can still come through that experience with serious debt. When my daughter was in hospital, fighting for her life, I still ended up paying more than R100 000.
I have an MA and have worked my whole life, with the exception of the two years when I couldn’t find work after being retrenched. Friends had to help when my daughter was wracked with leukaemia, and then the damage done by the potentially lifesaving treatments. Now I had to ask a friend for the money to pay for the biopsy for me. I do not find it entirely surprising that Luigi Mangione has become a folk hero in the United States after he was charged with killing Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthCare.
The process is horrible. I lay on a stretcher for about 30 minutes with my left breast, where they had seen the calcification, squeezed between plates while they tried to get perfect pictures of the calcification. Then the radiologist came in and using some machine propelled needle went into my breast three times to take tissue from the different parts that showed the calcification.
I have never been in such an uncomfortable position. Both my arms over my head, my chest tilted forward, my left breast under the tremendous pressure of the machines and someone at my back holding me still. I heard the people in the room talking about a bloody discharge coming out of my breast. I saw the discharge on the plate when they were repositioning me. Nobody spoke to me about it though.
When I got home I was in agony. My helper saw straight away that something was seriously wrong. My mother called but the pain was too much for me to be able to talk. I felt like I was floating outside of my body. Later that evening I had to get myself together. My daughter, who has been through so much with the death of her sister and then her father, was being capped for her water polo team. I had to take her there and be there for her and so I did.
I had to use Google to check what it meant when there was a bloody discharge from the breast. I saw that it could indicate the presence of cancer. A few days later my gynaecologist, who had referred me for the repeat mammogram, called me and told me that the biopsy results had come back and had shown that I had breast cancer. He said that luckily it had been detected early and was still contained in the ducts. But the biopsy had also shown that it was high grade cancer, meaning it was likely to grow quickly, can become invasive breast cancer, and if treated can come back and spread.
The radiologists got my gynaecologist to call me because we have a long relationship going back to before I had my girls. I thought I had steeled myself to the fact that I had cancer but it was still a shock to hear the words over the phone. I kept asking the doctor the same questions. He was kind and he answered every time. He told me what the next steps would be. I needed to get an MRI done to determine the extent of the cancer so the doctors could have a better idea of what the treatment should be.
I was in shock. Surely I couldn’t be dealing with this disease, again, while we were still mourning my daughter. My thoughts were racing. Would Nandi be an orphan? How will this affect her matric year? How can a God, whoever and whatever he or she is, allow this to happen? How does it seem that some people just cruise through life and I don’t seem to get a break? Are there really reasons for and lessons from these things that happen and keep happening? Is there some kind of lesson that I am supposed to learn, but which I am clearly not learning? Is there really rhyme and reason to life or is it just the luck of the draw? Thoughts and thoughts in a tightening circle.
No amount of thinking results in an answer. There is no existential revelation. That fact is that you lost your daughter to cancer and now you have it. You just have to get up, reach out to your people for support, keep going and face what comes.
At the end of the month I will have to face a double mastectomy, reconstruction and six weeks of recovery. My sister will come to stay with me. My friends will make sure my daughter gets to school and back, and to water polo. It will be hard but even in the moments of our greatest joy we live right against the gossamer thread that runs between an ordinary day and sudden fear and pain.
We must all face what comes.
Nontobeko Hlela is a research fellow with the Institute for Pan African Thought & Conversation and a PhD candidate in the department of politics and international relations at the University of Johannesburg.
The classroom must adapt for Generation Alpha:
Dear educators, parents and community leaders,
Every morning, millions of children step into classrooms carrying the weight of a world that feels far larger than the one we knew at their age. They are Generation Alpha — the most digitally connected, globally aware and socially conscious generation to date. Yet, they walk into spaces that were not designed for the realities they face.
For these children, the classroom is not just a place of learning — it is a microcosm of a rapidly shifting world. They sit with knowledge of global crises, the nuances of identity and the ceaseless hum of digital connectivity. They are fluent in the language of inclusion and diversity, not because it was taught to them, but because it is the water they swim in. And yet, they must navigate these truths in systems that often fail to acknowledge them.
We cannot overlook the tension this creates. When the frameworks meant to guide children feel irrelevant to their lived experience, they disengage — not out of defiance, but out of necessity. They are not rejecting learning; they are resisting irrelevance.
The fault is not theirs.
Generation Alpha is not a problem to solve but a possibility to nurture. They have shown us that they can think critically, adapt quickly and feel deeply. But to meet them where they are, we must first transform the environments we invite them into.
What must change?
1. Education must reflect reality: We must reimagine classrooms as spaces of exploration, not conformity. Let them question, create and collaborate in ways that honour their digital fluency and global awareness.
2. Mental health must be a priority: These children are growing up in an age of unprecedented psychological stress. We must equip educators with the tools to recognise and support emotional resilience, making mental health as central to education as literacy.
3. Inclusivity must be lived, not taught: For Generation Alpha, diversity is not a concept; it is their reality. Schools must be spaces where every child sees themselves reflected and valued, where differences are celebrated, not merely tolerated.
4. We must embrace uncertainty together: Generation Alpha will inherit a world defined by flux. Instead of shielding them from uncertainty, we must teach them to navigate it with curiosity and courage.
5. Normality must be redefined: What was once labelled as “abnormal” — neurodivergence, fluid identities or emotional expression — must now be seen as essential parts of the human experience. Our task is not to conform them but to celebrate their authenticity.
This is not a task for educators alone. It requires all of us — parents, policymakers and community leaders — to reimagine what it means to raise children in this era. The responsibility is collective, and the time to act is now. For in their eyes lies the blueprint for a more inclusive, empathetic and adaptable society.
Generation Alpha does not need us to save them; they need us to see them. To listen. To learn. To create with them a world that makes sense of the one they already live in.
Dave Swart is a clinical psychologist at the Inner Health Centre who has extensively explored the complex relationships between individual development and societal change.
ANC election commission secretary Matsila urges members not to elect ‘faces with the same problems’:
As the ANC prepares to hold its regional conferences and with its renewal process in motion, electoral commission secretary Chief Livhuwani Matsila has implored party members not to elect the “same faces with the same problems”.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, Matsila said the renewal of the party must start with electing leaders who will give confidence to supporters that the ANC — which lost its majority for the first time in last May’s general elections — has the ability to recover and rebuild itself.
Matsila warned that ANC members cannot elect the same people who have made mistakes to key positions, and still imagine that they can renew the ANC.
“My worry as an ANC member and a traditional leader is that we must make sure that we have credible people to lead the ANC and to lead society and to run clean government,” he said.
“The ANC has a lot of qualified people with capacity within its membership, we just need to make sure that some of those should lead the ANC.
“The same faces with the same problems or more will not restore confidence in the ANC’s capacity to lead the nation in my view. This is my personal view, it is not the position of the electoral committee.”
After years of talk about renewal, the ANC has finally put the wheels in motion for an era of accountability, but this may see the party suffer membership losses as a result of tighter discipline and higher ethical standards.
Last November, the national executive committee (NEC) amended the terms of reference of the integrity commission, which is tasked with dealing with ethical and political complaints against members and serves as an advisory body to the committee on matters affecting the ANC’s public image and reputation.
An NEC source said the commission now has powers to recommend action against people found wanting.
The party also introduced a compulsory foundation course for all its members to improve the quality of its cadres through political education. Members of the NEC and its provincial and regional leaders will be the first to undergo the five-module programme on the history, ethics and vision of the ANC.
Some party members are concerned that the new measures could see the ANC decline even further.
With the new regulations and measures in place, Matsila said he did not anticipate there would be teething problems when the regional conferences sit for their conferences.
“The processes are run by the provincial secretaries together with the secretary general’s office so obviously rules that are adopted by the NEC in terms of the elections of the ANC generally apply in that sense. The electoral committee is not really involved in those elections,” he said.
“Generally I think the regional and provincial conferences are actually smoothly run, the criteria are usually applied, but obviously there are tight competitions for leadership positions and that is normal in a political organisation.”
The ANC does not have a rule to bar anyone who doesn’t have post-matric qualification from standing for a leadership position, but the party now wants to select mayors from a pool of three candidates, all of whom must have tertiary education.
Matsila said the ANC’s constitution does not specify qualifications people should have to be elected to leadership roles; it was up to the members to choose those they thought would serve them better in the party and in government.
He said leaders elected in conferences follow rules in the party’s constitution and those in government, qualifications and experience are normally applied.
“I think the ANC membership in general is now conscious as to the standards in terms of qualities of those who should be elected into positions,” he said.
“I think it is a result of the NEC’s work of having the electoral committee adopt the rules and making sure that the rules are known now. People know the rules unlike in the past when rules were not there, because anything goes if there are no rules.”
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