Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
and businessmen and fourteen black women were arrested and charged under the Act, after a number of mixed-race children were born in the neighbouring township of Mahlatswetsa. Such was the stigma attached to interracial sex that the backwater town became world renowned, with the Chicago Tribune featuring the story in its 2 December issue of 1970.
‘If an atom bomb had been dropped on our town, it could not have had a greater impact,’ one elderly farmer says. Asked to describe Excelsior and its 700 white residents, he said: –
‘Well, let me put it this way. This is an Afrikaner’s town. There are no foreigners here. We had two Greeks, but they left.’ The law has shattered many lives outside Excelsior in recent years. A Cape Town judge jailed a 38-year-old white father of four for four months for conspiring to commit immorality with his mulatto maid … Sometimes judgments seem odd. Two white men were acquitted but two black women charged with them were tried separately and convicted.
Almost precisely ten years after the Excelsior outrage, my biological parents would create their own scandal. Doing one of the most natural things one human being can do with another, they too played out the very thing the architects and supporters of apartheid feared the most. A mixing of the races. A merging of black and white. Such a union, and more so the issue of such a union, served only to undermine in the strongest possible way the entire system on which apartheid was based. In their own way, the white British ewe and the black South African ram challenged the very essence of institutionalised racism that former South African prime minister, and the so-called mastermind of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, sought to create: the maintenance of white domination and the separation of the races. The Immorality Act was eventually repealed in 1985, five years after my birth, but not before thousands of people had been convicted for having sex across the colour line.
By the time my biological parents had begun to make the beast with two backs, Nelson Mandela was already languishing in prison on Robben Island, sixteen years into a life sentence for committing sabotage against the apartheid government. PW Botha was heading up the National Party and racial tensions were just a few years away from becoming the worst the country had ever seen. But in a well-to-do enclave in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, my biological mother was doing her bit to improve race relations.
Born in the North of England in 1957, my biological mother, Kris, found herself in South Africa because of a man. She had met Ken while they were both studying at the same college in the South of England in the late seventies. She had transferred from a college in the North to one in the county of Berkshire where Ken was also a student. His parents had emigrated to South Africa when he was three, but when he was seventeen he had decided to go back to the UK to complete his education.
Five years afters arriving back in England, and having finished his studies, Ken decided to return to South Africa to work for his parents. They had built a successful career for themselves in the catering industry and his father had achieved an influential position in a chain of hotels. And so, at the age of twenty-one, having been dating Ken for two years, Kris agreed to go back with him and they both began working in the affluent area of Sandton in Johannesburg, him managing his father’s restaurant, she as head housekeeper at the popular Balalaika Hotel.
The Sandton of the time was not the Sandton of today, which now boasts the title of ‘Africa’s richest square mile’. There were very few office blocks, the roads were suburban and there were no multiple lanes of traffic clamouring and careering through the city. At the time it was still little more than a residential suburb and Sandton City, considered today to be the ‘Rodeo Drive’ of Africa, sprawling with exclusive stores and upmarket eateries, was just a small shopping mall. The Balalaika was just around the corner in Sandown and was a well-known and well-liked ‘country’ hotel, popular with locals.
It was at the Balalaika that Kris met my biological father, Jackson ‘Jackie’ Tau (Tau means ‘lion’ in Sesotho) who, she would once describe in a letter to me as ‘different’ and ‘a cut above the others’, but unable to reach his full potential because of the politics of the time. He was thirty years old and head chef of the hotel restaurant. Jackson was married, with a wife who lived in the ‘homelands’, most likely QwaQwa (which translates as ‘whiter than white’), the region created by the apartheid government for Basotho people, as I’m told my father was. The homelands, or Bantustans, formed the cornerstone of apartheid policy and the white minority government’s desire to divide and rule. Residential areas were segregated by means of forced removals. The black majority was stripped of their citizenship and, depending on their ethnic group, assigned to the relevant, tribally based ‘self-governing’ homelands. But, being a largely mountainous area and less than suitable for cultivation, most of the men of QwaQwa left to become part of the migrant labour force, providing cheap labour for white-owned businesses.
At the time I was born Jackson already had one child, a daughter. He later had a son.
I have just one picture of my biological father, sent to me by Kris, more than twenty years after it was taken. It was the only one she had, she wrote, and she had kept it in an album from that time. In the picture, his head is turned to the side, allowing only for a side profile.
My father is half a face. An ear to match my own, the tight kink of my Leo’s mane, the too-wide African nose that belongs to his face, but that is unwelcome on mine. An eye, a forehead, my lips, a chin. We have identical hands. My father reminds me of myself, but only the good parts. If all the black and swill and spit and mire had come from her, then the light, the glow and the music must have come from him. In my mind his voice sounds like sugar beet, soaked overnight, heavy and thick. It is an adagio. Although, to the best of my knowledge, my father never met me, if I close my eyes I can hear him singing and see him cradling me on his forearm while he smokes a cigarette.
Thula thul, thula baba, thula sana, Thul’ubab uzobuya, ekuseni. Thula thul, thula baba, thula sana, Thul’ubab uzobuya, ekuseni.
(Hush, hush, hush-a-bye little man, Be quiet, baby, Be quiet, Daddy will be back in the morning. Hush, hush, hush-a-bye little man, Be quiet, baby, Be quiet, Daddy will be back in the morning.)
I like to imagine that when he walked into a room, he did so with his eyes up, his feet unapologetic, his chest proud. When they called him ‘kaffir’ he would smile. When they smiled and called him Jackson, he would raise a correcting finger and say ‘Mr Tau’, and when they called him ‘kaffir’ again, he would, in turn, smile again. I pretend I know my father. I pretend to know that his greatest desire in life was to be a good man. That his indiscretion with my biological mother didn’t mean he loved his wife any less. Rather, he saw someone breaking, ready to shatter, and felt compelled to protect her. In my mind my father is Othello.
Despite it being virtually unheard of for black and white people to be friends, my biological father and Kris, in her words, ‘got to know’ each other and started jogging together in the early morning before work.
In one of the three letters I ever received from Kris she once said of their relationship:
Absolutely no one guessed that what appeared to be just a couple of hotel staff becoming friends was in fact a deep and understanding relationship. And while the relationship grew, Ken and myself grew more and more distant.
The relationship continued, the threat of imprisonment apparently not enough to prevent them embarking on their perilous tryst and eventually, in the December of 1979, my biological mother became pregnant with me. Choosing not to disclose her affair, Kris told Ken of the pregnancy and they married shortly after, exactly five months before I was born. None the wiser as to her secret, both Kris and Ken’s white families looked forward to their first grandchild.
Ken, believing the child his new wife was carrying was his, was apparently ‘overjoyed’ at the prospect of becoming a father, but Kris carried the nagging, shameful doubt that the baby growing inside her was the result of her affair with Jackson.
My relationship with Jackson came to an end when it was discovered I was pregnant, but he saw no reason that it should, and he did not want to believe that there was even the remotest possibility that I was carrying his child.
For the duration of her pregnancy she hid her terrible secret,