Born a Crime

came and tried to get him on cleanliness and health-code violations. Clearly they had never heard of the Swiss. That failed dism ...

that, your other option is to make it a normal restaurant and only serve whites.” He closed the restaurant. After apartheid fell ...

bars. It was an explosion of culture. My dad lived two blocks over from Rockey, on Yeo Street, right next to this incredible par ...

Sunday afternoon. Even though apartheid had ended, my mom had made her decision: She didn’t want to get married. So we had our h ...

European Christmas was the best Christmas ever. My dad went all out. He had Christmas lights and a Christmas tree. He had fake s ...

rather contentious one when it comes to African Christmas, a matter of pride. When an African dad buys his kid a present, the la ...

have that and a bottle of Sprite, and for dessert a plastic container of custard with caramel on top. A good chunk of those afte ...

was it. Being with my dad was like watching a web series. I’d get a few minutes of information a few minutes at a time, then I’d ...

Abel. He was incensed by the idea of my mom being in contact with her previous love, and she decided it was safer for everyone i ...

dad’s German friends had left for Cape Town. If he wasn’t seeing me, he had no reason to stay, so he left. His leaving wasn’t an ...

country. But even as my life was moving forward, the questions about my dad were always there in the back of my mind, bubbling u ...

dad.” “You have your dad’s smile.” “You’re clean and tidy like your father.” I never turned to bitterness, because she made sure ...

the phone book. I started by reaching out to some of his old connections, German expats in Johannesburg, a woman who used to dat ...

couldn’t give me any information, because they didn’t know who I was. I tried calling them, and I got the runaround there as wel ...

came back in the post: “Great to hear from you. How are you? Love, Dad.” He gave me his address in Cape Town, in a neighborhood ...

walked down the road all these old white men were walking toward me and past me. My father was pushing seventy by that point, an ...

We picked up right where we’d left off, which was him treating me exactly the way he’d treated me as a thirteen-year-old boy. Li ...

opened it up. It was a scrapbook of everything I had ever done, every time my name was mentioned in a newspaper, everything from ...

in my life closed right up in an instant, like only a day had passed since I’d last seen him. For years I’d had so many question ...

greatest gift you can give to another human being. Once we reconnected, I was overcome by this drive to make up for all the year ...