by Thandiwe Jumo – 12 November 2015
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When she suffered from crippling depression during the third year of her BCom degree 25 years ago, local author and UKZN alumnus, Ms Nirvashnee Naidu, had no idea that overcoming the challenge would be the inspiration for her first novel, Footprints on the Moon.
The inspirational and motivational book addresses themes of domestic violence, depression and abuse which are dominant in the South African society but, most of all, the novel tells a story of a resilient and courageous woman whose strength and human spirit refused to buckle.
‘My biggest challenge in my university career occurred during the latter half of my third year when I started suffering from depression,’ said Naidu. ‘It was totally unexpected, I had never heard of depression before as 25 years ago, very few people knew what depression was. I didn’t understand it and was left totally powerless in the face of this inexplicable illness that just hit me from nowhere. I was hospitalised for about a week and missed out on three weeks of work and just barely managed to get back on my feet and complete that year,’ explained Naidu.
When Naidu started writing the book, she wanted it to be an entertaining fictional novel but the stories in the media about gender-based violence and depression related suicides motivated her to use her talent and personal experience to produce a novel that was “socially relevant and socially conscious”.
‘At the time, there were high profile cases of women being killed by boyfriends and husbands which initiated my research into these issues in South Africa. As I researched abuse and depression and gender-based violence and as I got more deeply involved with the characters and with these issues, I realised that this couldn’t be just be another fictional novel. After everything that I had read and everything that I had learned, it would be socially remiss of me not to use this book to try and make a difference. So that became the aim, to make that difference,’ she said.
