The festive season is always a time of great reflection for me. Many years ago, I was a child growing up in the township of Meadowlands in Soweto and, like all children my age, I looked forward to Christmas Day.

My mother, who had always been the main breadwinner at home (though my grandmother worked as a domestic worker in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, she was paid peanuts and barely had money for anything other than bread and the most basic and barest of necessities), would do everything possible to ensure that my sister and I had new clothes like other children in the neighbourhood...