I was born Québécoise in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I lived for 8 years before moving to other English provinces like Ontario and Manitoba. I arrived home, in Québec, at the age of 12. After my college degree in Psychology at the Cégep de l’Outaouais, I travelled the world for a year then did a communication/journalism degree at the University of Québec in Montréal. I worked at Radio-Canada for a few years before obtaining the posting of my dreams: journalist in an international reporting programme—Nord-Sud (North-South). My first mission was South Africa because Nelson Mandela had just been freed. In the dozen or so documentaries I did, one of them required interviewing Jay Naidoo, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU. And that is how I found, under the same roof, my dream—international correspondent—and the love of my life. Eight months later, I was living in Johannesburg with Jay and my 4-year-old son in shared custody between the two continents.
I hence covered the whole Mandela era, from his liberation from prison to the end of his presidency, and beyond, for French-Canadian radio, television and press
I lived great fears, from gunmen coming at home trying to kill my husband to finding hidden microphones in our house, but I also lived great moments, perhaps the most incredible one of my career being Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as president. To live so close to this great man—he was our neighbour in Cape Town, my husband being a minister in his cabinet—and to have been such a close witness to his five years in the president’s seat gave me back faith in humanity.
When Nelson Mandela left government in 1999, it was the moment for me to answer the repeated requests from André Bastien, founder of Libre Expression publishing house, to write a book on the historical period. I wrote my first book, Mon Afrique (Conflict of the Heart) about the Mandela era (1990–1999) from the apartheid I lived to the birth of democracy I witnessed as a journalist, woman, White, mother of a child in shared custody between two continents, and of two other children with my South African husband, and wife of a minister in Mandela’s government. Notre Afrique (2006) is the clamoured sequel to Mon Afrique, with a wider view on Africa and the place of this terrible and magnificent continent in the world. Eva (2005) is an historical novel on the 1960–1990 period in South Africa and answers the question what was it like to live under apartheid? through a forbidden and powerful love story. I wrote a novel on social justice, the result of having spent years socializing with the greatest revolutionaries of South Africa: Encore un pont à traverser, (2010) is a social fable set in the West with South African influence, on social justice and the organization of a revolution. I wrote a travel guide on South Africa (Comprendre l’Afrique du Sud) in 2011.
After having travelled in 57 countries, often accompanying my husband in his meetings with great leaders of this planet, with activists, scientists, Nobel laureates, civil society leaders, presidents, people that are discussing the state of the planet we are leaving our children and the mountains we have to move, together, to stop its destruction in the name of profit, the book Demain, il sera trop tard, mon fils (“Tomorrow will be too late, my son” - 2014) was born, a conversation with my son Kami who, at 21 years old only, asked terribly lucid questions about the state of the planet, and that forces us to reflect. “There has been a genocide of values,’ he says. Husband and father Jay Naidoo also joins the conversation, from the perspective of someone who has already, in a sense, changed the world by his role in the liberation of South Africa.
I then wrote a book on cannabis in the form of a political satire. Cannabis has saved my life, literally, and after my two-year research to write the book, I discovered the power and extent of the evilness of the political and pharmaceutical world to exclude from our regular pharmacopoeia the most important medicinal plant on the planet. I hang out with many people who are alive today solely because of cannabis. I have also cowritten several other books on the beauty of life, injustice, mixed couples and love.
I have been married to Jay Naidoo, author of Fighting for Justice and Change: Organizing tomorrow today since 1990 and we are now starting to have grandchildren—all mixed race and religion and language. That is the future of the world: where there are no borders. Just humans loving each other.
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