Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
so it seemed ridiculous to try to blend into a collective. And so, in what would become my first modification of self, and without consultation, I cast off that which was keeping me in bondage, stuck fast to the unremarkable. Overnight, when I was about 11 years old, I became Sara-Jayne, so that now I stood out on the school register. Standing out was important. Ironically, later in life, I would grapple tirelessly with a desperate need to fit in.
Of course, this initial alteration offered one of my earliest opportunities to learn that making extrinsic modifications to myself in no way altered what it was that I felt on the inside. Unfortunately, I was a slow learner.
As it was, I also hated the name Karoline. It didn’t fit either, but I knew it was – or at least had once been – a part of me, had belonged to me. They had called me Karoline, the biological mother and the man who had believed he was my father. Karoline. With a K. A name that ironically meant ‘joy’. There were already lots of K names in their family and they obviously wanted to continue what they thought was a trend. I sometimes questioned why they’d even bothered to give me a name at all. They had killed me off so early in the tragedy that they would have been forgiven for simply calling me ‘baby’. ‘The part of the unwanted bastard child was played by ‘baby’.’
At various points, during a difficult adolescence when being Sara-Jayne became too much, I considered simply swapping one name for the other. I was still naïve enough to believe that a straightforward substitution would eradicate the feelings of insecurity, discontent and apartheid that plagued me so often. I saw Karoline as my backup plan and felt that I had the right to take the name back. Mercifully, common sense prevailed and Sara-Jayne weathered the storm.
Even before my troublesome teenage years, though, there were signs that I was having difficulty understanding when and where Karoline stopped and Sara-Jayne started. In primary school a friend once asked what my middle name was. ‘Jane,’ I told her, then went on to rattle off the full name I was given at birth, plus the first, middle and maiden names of my biological mother. ‘Ask Sarah what her middle name is!’ my friends would prod each other excitedly, and I would perform my party trick of the thousand monikers. I liked being the centre of my friends’ attention, but at the same time felt uncomfortable that what secured their interest in the first place was something about me that was strange, different, separate, weird, curious and odd. Everyone I knew – except for my older brother, Adam (my parents’ first adopted child) – had the name their mummies and daddies had given them when they were born. Their names hadn’t changed and neither had their parents. Both of mine had and I never really lost the sense that they could again.
Over the years, as my life as Sara-Jayne began to meander along its own path, something happened that I had not counted on. I found myself being drawn back to Karoline. Ultimately, I allowed her to be reborn and then to be laid to rest with a dignity she had not been afforded by them. What I can say is that after all that has happened, Karoline has now gone, which is strange because in one sense Karoline is me, in another I am Karoline, and my story is about both of us. What happened to her and why, and what happened to me and how?
CHAPTER 2
An immoral act
Even before I was born, I was a problem child. A problem unborn child, but a problem nevertheless. When I made my entrance into the world by way of the surgeon’s knife, eight days earlier than expected at the Sandton Clinic in Johannesburg on 1 August 1980, one of history’s most abhorrent political ideologies was firmly in place in South Africa. It was also one that would ensure the first few weeks of my life would be nothing less than ‘problematic’.
Although it existed for years as a social movement, apartheid was officially introduced into law in South Africa by DF Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party – the ‘Reunited National Party’ – on his party’s victory in the 1948 whites-only general election. From that moment until its theoretical end in 1994, the government introduced legislation to reinforce its desire to create a racially divided South Africa.
In 1950, two key pieces of legislation – the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act – were passed, requiring strict classification of all South Africans according to racial group. This classification would determine where people, people who weren’t white, could live and work. And who they could get in to bed with. People were classified as either White, Indian, Coloured or Black (‘Native’), often on the basis of spurious criteria. In South Africa the term ‘coloured’ is used to describe someone with mixed ancestry, with origins in southern Africa and other parts of the world, including India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Europe. They are the descendants of slaves and slave owners, the colonisers and the colonised.
Such was the significance of racial classifications under apartheid that a designated office was set up to monitor the classification process. Where a person’s race wasn’t immediately obvious, or if someone wished to be reclassified (usually from coloured to white), certain tests were carried out to determine which group people should be assigned to. These tests were based on public perception of the individual and by their appearance: skin colour, facial features and, infamously, hair. The now notorious ‘pencil test’ decreed that if an individual could hold a pencil in their hair when they shook their head, they could not be classified as white. Such was the absurdity of these tests that often members of the same family would be separated into different racial groups, resulting in divided families, forced apart by the government’s nonsensical policies.
Later, the National Party government enacted further laws that would segregate and control all areas of life, from political rights, voting, freedom of movement, property ownership, leisure, education, medical care, transport, social security, taxation and, of course, sex.
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (prohibiting marriages between ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’) was among the first pieces of apartheid legislation to be passed following the National Party’s rise to power and, together with the pre-existing Immorality Act, sought to further enforce the idea of a ‘separate’ South Africa. The word apartheid literally translates from Afrikaans as ‘the state of being apart’, or ‘apart-ness’.
Apartheid proper had been established in law for just over three decades by the time my biological parents committed their illegal, ‘immoral’ sin and I, as the result of their misdeed, had been born a crime of the very worst kind. An indiscretion of Shakespearean proportions – ‘Now very now a black ram. Is tupping your white ewe.’ Theirs was a union that not only terrified proponents of apartheid, but one that was enshrined in the statute books as a transgression so dark and foul that it carried with it, in law, a penalty of incarceration, but in actuality, a punishment often far worse.
While over time I came to understand what had happened to Karoline, learning in very basic terms what apartheid was and how my conception was deemed a criminal act, it wasn’t until I saw in black and white how vehemently the apartheid government sought to prevent the types of union from which I was born that I understood the significance and gravity of what I represented.
IMMORALITY ACT, NO. 5 OF 1927
To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto.
BE IT ENACTED by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa, as follows:–
1 Any European male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a native female, and any native male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a European female … shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years.
2 Any native female who permits any European male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her and any European female who permits any native male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding four years…
Ironically, almost twenty years to the day since the National Party’s 1950 amendment to the 1927 Immorality Act (extending the ban on sex between whites and blacks to include all non-whites), a sex scandal involving several enthusiastic supporters of the National Party would strike at the very core of the