Blood Relatives
This essay was begun in the early eighties, in the heydays of apartheid and the ‘struggle’ against it. I found a deep need to explore my identity as a South African of mixed origins. I felt uncomfortable with the monica of ‘coloured’, or more exactly, ‘Cape Coloured’ bestowed upon me by the state and needed to come to a new understanding of my origins and place in my country in light of my political perspectives.
I ‘used’ my large extended family as a palette to explore these issues and as a meditative process to mediate a new perspective which is that though subjected to the moulding influences of a separate existence and the inherent racism that informed it, I felt a strong need to be part of an undivided South Africa, free of racism.
