The canned-lion-hunting industry is unfortunately not a product of my imagination. While South Africa is a beautiful tourist destination that I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to visit, please think twice before cuddling, petting, or volunteering with lions or their cubs.

Very few of the private lion parks or predator breeding facilities in South Africa can be considered to be genuine conservation undertakings, as they breed predators for a variety of commercial purposes, like canned-lion hunting, where tame or captive-bred predators are shot in confined areas.

There is no conservation value in captive-bred lions, since none of them have ever been successfully reintroduced into the wild, and yet this industry attracts thousands of misguided volunteers from across the world who contribute in excess of $100,000 a month to it.

Very few, if any, of the lion cubs that tourists and volunteers get to pet or cuddle have been abandoned in the wild; they are simply getting the cubs used to humans so that they lose all fear, which makes them easier to shoot.

If you would like to learn more about this industry, there is an excellent documentary called Blood Lions that I recommend watching. The website is www.bloodlions.org. Please consider contributing to their very worthy cause.

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The AIDS pandemic in South Africa in the late ’90s and early 2000s was devastating. The then–South African president, Thabo Mbeki, went on record stating that “a virus cannot cause a syndrome” (implying HIV cannot cause AIDs), and his AIDs denialism had catastrophic consequences, with more than 300,000 South Africans dying.

The people worst hit by the pandemic were women and children. Besides the thousands that passed away, it fell to the women who remained (many of them grandmothers who were living in desperate poverty) to care for the HIV-positive orphans left in the wake of the crisis.

I first heard about the Stephen Lewis Foundation during my years of volunteering in Soweto. Their support of the grannies/gogos of South Africa through their Grandmother to Grandmothers Campaign has been life-changing for many of these women, and I am indebted to them for what they and their volunteers have already done, and continue to do, for my countrywomen.

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Mandla’s story was inspired by Nkosi Johnson, a child living with AIDS in South Africa, who passed away at the age of twelve in 2001. Nkosi was legally adopted by a white woman, Gail Johnson, when his own mother, Nonthlanthla Daphne Nkosi, became too ill to care for him. Nkosi’s activism inspired me to volunteer with HIV-positive children and his story is both heartbreaking and incredibly uplifting. We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy’s Courage and A Mother’s Love by Jim Wooten is a must-read.

The character of Ruth was inspired by a real South African woman, Glenda Kemp, who began stripping in the early 1970s with her pet python, “Oupa.” Her book, Glenda Kemp: Snake Dancer, is an interesting read.

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