It Will Take Time To Get Back To Normal

Former captives offer released hostage Stephen McGown advice on the long road to recovery.

- Jacques Myburgh & Joanie Bergh

FOR six long, gruelling years Stephen McGown watched the birds flying across the Sahara Desert where he was being held captive. They were headed south to the country of his birth, to where his beloved family and friends were waiting for him.

Now, like those birds, the former hos­ tage is free. But having at last returned home to South Africa, will he be able up to pick up where he left offbefore his life was stolen from him?

His father, Malcolm, and wife, Cathe­ rine, were overjoyed when they were told at the end of July that Stephen (42) was going to be released by the Al Qaeda faction in Mali that had held him captive since 2011.

When YOU visited his father just a few weeks earlier, Stephen’s dusty motorbike still stood in the garage. It was this bike he’d been riding across Africa on an ad­ venture holiday before he was kidnapped at a restaurant in Timbuktu along with two other foreigners.

“Stephen will have to come and wash the bike when he gets back. I think it will be therapeutic for him to do it him­ self,” Malcolm told YOU at the time of the interview (YOU, 27 July).

Whether he’s per­ formed this task is unknown because soon after being re­ united Stephen , Catherine and Malcolm headed offto Kruger National Park for a well­deserved break.

But before their departure at a news conference the former hostage, still with uncut hair and a bushy beard, said he bore his captors no ill will.

“You only have one life, you can’t stay angry. You need to forgive and move on,” says Stephen, who converted to Islam – the religion of his abductors – during his time in captivity.