LITMIR.BIZ

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school, still went despite being one of the first generation of white boys who didn’t have to. He simply didn’t have a plan B.

      He was one of very few people in the army that year who weren’t coloured or black.

      When I finished high school in 1995, I applied for a scholarship to an advertising school in Cape Town, as the tuition fees were more than my parents could afford. I was told my skin was the wrong colour. I still went, after my parents remortgaged their house to pay for it.

      One of the upsides of our new democracy was that the world opened up to us in a way it never had before. As a result, a new wanderlust broke out among young white South Africans. My oldest brother was the first in our family to leave, just two years after Mandela’s release, to go backpacking around Europe. Having had a taste of the world, he came back to South Africa just long enough to get a qualification before returning to Europe, where he settled in the UK and eventually married a British woman.

      When my family went to London for the wedding, my mother got her first-ever passport at the age of fifty-three. My father and I already had passports, but only because we’d both been to Namibia – my father on a one-off fishing trip, and me for a week of canoeing the year before.

      In London, I was amazed to share the Tube with well-dressed black people who spoke not in African accents but British ones.

      Having had a taste of the world beyond South Africa, the travel bug bit me too and in 1999 I left, aged twenty-one and armed with a working holiday visa for the UK.

      Those of us who left were criticised by the government for creating a ‘brain drain’ in the country at a time when it was hard at work rebuilding itself. While it’s true that many people left because of the limited job prospects for white people in a country that was hastily redressing its race balance, my own motivations were more personal. I was in an enforced break in my copywriting career after losing my job at an ad agency. And I had fallen for a man in London during the trip for my brother’s wedding. The relationship didn’t last, but I never went back to live in South Africa.

      In London, I quickly got out of touch with what was going on back home. I went over to see my parents every eighteen months or so, but with only two weeks there at a time, I became a tourist in my own country.

      It was on a writing retreat in Spain that I first started questioning the way things were back home. By then I was a British Citizen through naturalisation, having lived in England long enough to get a British passport. South Africa felt very far away.

      But when I interviewed a local farmer in Aracena called Alfonso Perez, I suddenly felt myself drawn back to my homeland. Alfonso told us one story after another of the Spanish Civil War and how it had divided his country, with friends and even family finding themselves on opposite sides of a violent struggle.

      I couldn’t help drawing comparisons with South Africa, and faint memories started flickering in my mind. Pieced together from several phone calls to my mother in South Africa, one of those memories became a short story.

      I never thought it would become the prologue to a book. My then husband, a Brit and also a writer, put the idea in my head on my return to London. ‘There’s a book here,’ he said. ‘And only you can write it.’

      At first I laughed it off: I didn’t have a book in me.

      But then the memories started coming back: snippets of stories my parents had told me when I was growing up of my mother’s work in the townships.

      I became curious, wanting to know more about those stories and the stories behind them.

      At first my mother hated the idea.

      ‘I was just doing my job,’ she said.

      But she was keen to encourage my writing and eventually gave in. Just three months after my time in Spain, I used a Christmas trip to South Africa to start doing some research.

      It was a frustrating process. My mother’s memory was sketchy in places, leaving big gaps in the story. Many of the places that might have kept official records from that time were closed for the holiday season. And without a clear contextual framework or timeline, the few interviews I did made little sense to me.

      I realised if I was going to do this, I had to do it properly.

      A year and a half later, I took three months off work and went back to South Africa armed with a laptop, a Dictaphone and a crash course in interviewing from my boss, an ex-investigative journalist.

      This time I wanted to hear not just my mother’s side of the story. I wanted to speak to the people who lived in the townships, and the authorities who’d built them. I wanted to speak to the people who’d worked for the apartheid government then, and the people who work for the ANC government now. I wanted to speak to the rioters who’d stood up for their human rights, and the policemen who’d arrested them.

      This is what I found.

       Chapter 1

       Going home

      My mother is in the passenger seat in front of me, my father next to her, driving. I’m in the back of the Volkswagen Jetta with a bright-pink gift bag of treats on my lap.

      ‘Just a little something to snack on till we get home,’ says my mother.

      There’s dried mango and guava, and big, fat raisins still on their stems. My hands reach first for the biltong and drywors, the dried meat and sausage that I crave in London every time I feel homesick.

      I’m not really hungry, just tired. It took an eleven-hour flight from London, a six-hour stopover in Johannesburg and a two-hour domestic flight to get to George, the nearest airport to Knysna. But Knysna isn’t our next stop. My mother, as always, has managed to squeeze some work into the day. While she was going to be in George anyway, she thought she’d get a radio interview out of the way for Epilepsy Week, a major event on the Epilepsy South Africa calendar.

      My mother has been a social worker at the Knysna branch of Epilepsy South Africa for twenty years now. When she first joined it was called the South African National Epilepsy League, or SANEL. For most people in Knysna it will always be SANEL and the people who live there, most of whom have brain damage from epilepsy, will always be ‘Sanellers’. A big part of my mother’s job is raising awareness of the condition, hence the stop at Eden FM.

      My father and I listen to the interview in the car outside the radio station as my mother reassures Eden’s audience that people with epilepsy can live normal lives. She sounds confident as she answers the questions she scripted for the DJ last night, but her answers are very much unscripted.

      ‘People can tell when you’re just reading it,’ she said before she went in. ‘It sounds insincere.’

      My mother’s smiling, alto voice works well on the radio. These days I’m more used to hearing it over faint phone lines to the UK, so it’s strange to hear it resonating through the stereo speakers in the back doors of the car. She sounds younger than sixty-four.

      Fifteen minutes later, my mother is back. Just one more stop, she promises. My aunt, who lives in George, recorded the interview and we need to pick up the tape.

      When we get to my aunt and uncle’s, I notice an electric gate where there was no gate, electric or otherwise, before. ‘They were burgled,’ my mother says matter-of-factly. ‘While they were in the house, sleeping. And all they’d left open was a small kitchen window.’

      Had my aunt and uncle still had Snorretjies, their yappy little lapdog with his titular whiskers, the burglars might have been scared off. In South Africa, dogs are man’s best alarm system and as a result, most white families have at least one.

      My parents’ last two dogs, Lulu and Nina, were what my father calls ‘township specials’. Drive through any township and you’ll see Lulus and Ninas everywhere: medium-sized mongrels with short, golden hair and white chests.

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