Coloured Mother

(Written 12 May  - 16 June 2016)

South Africa achieved democracy in 1994. With the euphoria of the first post-apartheid elections came all kinds of expectations, on international and national levels, but – even more significantly – for each one of us involved, on a deeply personal level. For each of us, this forms part of our identity, part of our narrative. When the stories of our lives are told, whether spoken or written, apartheid, its demise, our expectations of life after its demise and the reality that prevailed (as seen from each one’s perspective), will constitute a significant set of chapters.

I was classified as “Coloured”, under the racist apartheid system, and raised in that context, with all the joys and limitations that came with it. When I eventually decided to get married, I ended up marrying someone who’d been classified and raised as “White”. Before 1992, that marriage would not have been allowed in South Africa.

One of the many things that people from South Africa have to deal with is the baggage of apartheid. All of us who lived in SA during that era, as well as our children, have to navigate our way through some very strange waters, even now, 22 years after ’94. The baggage includes many beliefs and fears, even superstitions, after all those years of indoctrination. For example, when a ‘mixed’ couple - e.g. White-Coloured - is expecting a baby, there’s huge speculation about what the baby will look like. If the baby’s looks are more White, there are sighs of relief from certain quarters, accompanied by comments that the baby turned out well. In colloquial-speak, they say “Die kind is goedgebaster”, with “Baster” referring to a hybrid (probably more like ‘mongrel’) of sorts. The phrase is an Afrikaans one, meaning “The child is a good hybrid.” A more recent term used to describe children like these is “Top Deck”, referring to a chocolate that has a layer of white chocolate and a layer of brown chocolate. While this term is regarded as humorous, it is are not as inoffensive as one might think.

As you can imagine, I have many stories to tell, after having had two children from this ‘mixed’ marriage. 22 years later, the narrative reveals an interesting sub-plot, as my children apply for admission to tertiary institutions. The topic of identity arose, recently, around the supper table, and I was intrigued by my children’s answers. They concurred with each other that, mainly because of the schools (formerly White) they attended, their exposure was largely to that of a White culture. For me, as one of the parents who had consciously selected mixed schools, where our children would be comfortable growing up in a diverse, multi-cultural environment, this came as a surprise. Then again, talking to my daughter on a daily basis about what everyday life is like at their high school, I can see that there’s a lot more to it than “With which culture do you identify most?”, because our children are definitely growing up with a lot more exposure to people from different backgrounds than anyone of my generation (in South Africa).

(This, of course, is my personal story about my children.  For the majority of South African children, the schools they attend were set aside for Non-White people, built with inferior facilities and, in many cases, appallingly deficient in many ways.  A sad reality of post-1994 South Africa is that apartheid based on ‘race’ has largely been replaced by apartheid based on economics: when we say the best schools are open to ‘everyone’, we actually mean ‘everyone who can afford the exorbitant fees’.)   

But back to the topic. People who don’t know our family assume that my children are White, and there’s a peculiar set of responses when they discover their rainbow background. My daughter has had to deal with all kinds of reactions to schoolmates’ realisations that her mother is not White. And so began the issue of the “Coloured Mother”. It’s become a joke for us, but for many people it’s a talking point: she is a curiosity because she has a Coloured Mother, and I’m a curiosity because I am the Coloured Mother. You see school kids surreptitiously peering at me, checking out the Coloured Mother. What’s even funnier for me is that it’s not only White kids and their parents who express surprise. J  Oh, the shackles that bind us……

The thing with any family is, when you’re living your life, doing things as a family, eating together, washing the dishes, hanging out in the lounge over a game of Scrabble, you’re just a family. You’re not looking at each other all the time thinking, “Wow, you look so White and I look so Coloured”, any less than a family with a disabled member  thinks about the disability everytime they look at the person. As clichéd as it might sound, a healthily-functioning family is a nucleus of love and acceptance, of nurturing, and of joy in each other’s uniqueness. It is only when that family is looked at by outsiders that the othering and the judgement begin – “Oh my God, look at that disabled boy!” Or, in our case, “Oh my God, have you seen her Coloured mother?!”

I really hope that in my lifetime – maybe in my grandchildren’s generation? – I’ll see a different South Africa, where diversity is celebrated for the beauty that it is, and not whispered about as though it’s a shameful secret. I long for a society where what we look like is not the huge determining factor it currently is.

What can I say? I always have been, and always will be, an idealist.