Born a Crime

come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time. You can’t make up for that with an interview, but I had to fig ...

going on here?” “I want to get to know you.” “Is this how you normally get to know people, by interrogating them?” “Well...not r ...

sat quietly in his backyard and listened to old Elvis Presley records. The whole time he said not one word about himself. Then, ...

...

When Dutch colonists landed at the southern tip of Africa over three hundred years ago, they encountered an indigenous people kn ...

and the first mixed people of South Africa were born. To work the colonists’ farms, slaves were soon imported from different cor ...

have Asian features, some have white features, some have black features. It’s not uncommon for a colored man and a colored woman ...

The history of colored people in South Africa is, in this respect, worse than the history of black people in South Africa. For a ...

THE MULBERRY TREE At the end of our street in Eden Park, right in a bend at the top of the road, stood a giant mulberry tree gro ...

and pick berries from it, eating as many as they could and filling up bags to take home. They would all play under the tree toge ...

The animosity I felt from the colored people I encountered growing up was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with. ...

himself in white culture while still living in the black community. Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black c ...

When apartheid came, colored people defied easy categorization, so the system used them—quite brilliantly—to sow confusion, hatr ...

grandfather couldn’t keep his hands off the chocolate, eh? But it’s not your fault you’re colored, so keep trying. Because if yo ...

become straight enough, your skin might become light enough, your accent might become polished enough—and you’d be reclassified ...

words. That’s where the government came up with things like the pencil test. If you were applying to be white, the pencil went i ...

you were allowed. And colored people didn’t just get promoted to white. Sometimes colored people became Indian. Sometimes Indian ...

produced documentation proving they were white, the child could be classified as colored, and the family had to make a decision. ...

slur was boesman. “Bushman.” “Bushie.” Because it called out their blackness, their primitiveness. The worst way to insult a col ...

because of the other race that they didn’t get into the club. It’s basically the bouncer at the door telling you, “We can’t let ...