Apartheid left Lovemore N’dou with mental and physical scars. Now he wants to go home to
South Africa and help
Lovemore Lawyers neighbours a Macedonian bakery, a Fijian grocery store and Polish butcher in the heart of Rockdale, a cosmopolitan suburb of Sydney. Many of the shops in the area offer tempting tastes of home to immigrants from every corner of the globe. Lovemore N’dou, who won a world title as a boxer and now runs his own law firm in the area, can relate to Rockdale easily. But, for all his success in the ring and the courtroom, N’dou’s thoughts are never too far from Musina, the tiny mining town in South Africa he once called home.
You don’t have to spend long in the company of this articulate and softly spoken lawyer before you realise the brutality he faced as a boy in the Limpopo province during the last days of apartheid. To illustrate the impact the regime had on his life, N’dou only has to lift his left arm. As he raises it, slowly and hesitantly, it makes a sharp crack, like a branch broken on your knee. That arm once propelled a razor-sharp jab, but it was damaged long before he fought for
boxing titles – all because a white girl showed an interest in him at his local grocery in Musina.