In 1965, Sandra Laing was pulled out of her boarding school classroom in South Africa and sent home to her parents. Her misdeed? She was of obvious mixed-blood in a white only school. Thus began years of litigation and anguish that would find Sandra reclassified from white to coloured and back to white again. Writer Judith Stone was assigned to bring this unusual story, When She was White, to life in print. She spent over five years with Sandra, beginning in 2001, interviewing, shadowing her and getting to the heart of Sandra's horrific nightmare and the insanity of a country that spawned it.
When Sandra was born to Sannie and Abraham Laing in 1955, they noticed that she was a darker hue, thick lips and that her curly hair became more so over the years. Still, she was their child and despite the whispers that Sannie had been with a black man, Sandra was raised as a white child. Was her appearance a result of infidelity, a "throwback" genetic quirk or was their black blood flowing through the bloodlines? Nevertheless, the government reclassified Sandra from being white to an identity of coloured.
Sandra had no idea why she was expelled from school, believing for a long time, it was because she hit other children when they teased and harassed her on a daily basis because she looked coloured or black. Abraham Laing began litigation to have his daughter reinstated as White and reinstated in school. It was a long battle that eventually went to the Supreme Court but in 1966, Sandra was reclassified as White again. Her reclassification angered many Afrikaners who felt their blood was being corrupted. It took another year to find a school that would take her; finally she was placed in a Convent school where she was finally happy.
Sandra always felt comfortable among the blacks because her family lived in Swaziland, a black rural township where they had two stores. When she was fifteen she ran off with a married black man, disgracing her family and lived among the native Africans, most times in poverty. Sandra's memories were so painful that she forgot much of her childhood and young adulthood but with the author's guidance she was able to recapture much of that fractured memory little by little, oftentimes breaking down in tears. She never doubted her parents loved her; she was especially close to her mother but the damage was done as far as her father was concerned. It was a slap in the face to have fought the legal battles to declare his daughter as white, only for her to go live among blacks.
To understand what a travesty this was is to get a grasp on the apartheid system that was only abolished in the early 1990s in South Africa. Consider segregation in the southern United States that ended in 1964 and multiply by it by tenfold in South Africa. It was that much more oppressive, insidious, demeaning, cruel and inhumane. The Afrikaners were vested in their strict segregation policies and stringent about keeping the races apart thus keeping their white blood pure. The Apartheid system, according to them, was designed to keeps one's culture. There were three classifications (and everyone was registered at birth by law), white or Afrikaners, descendants of the European Dutch British and Germans that conquered the country; Coloured, which included mixed black and white, Asians and Indian (later received their own classification) and other subcategories; and Native or Bantu, black. The Afrikaners not only took their land and denied them basic human rights but did not want to designate them as Africans, claiming the country name as their own. They kept the back man down, isolated, ignorant, poor and subservient. The South Africans fervently believed the U.S. made a regrettable mistake by eradicating segregation.
Piecing Sandra's story was a laborious task for not only Stone, but Sandra was also trying to sustain a living while being scrutinized by the media. There were documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, and even talk of movie rights to her life. Along the way Sandra had herself reclassified as coloured, bore several children and had a hard time maintaining relationships. Estranged from her family, later attempts at reconciliation were aborted, sometimes by the poor choices she made.
This was a difficult, emotional read; at times I was wiping tears away, vacillating between wanting to close the book and hurry and finish it. I thought I knew about apartheid but this book raised my awareness to another level giving me an education to just how irrational and psychotic the South African government and its people were. This is not for the faint at heart; beware, read with caution.
Reviewed by Dera R. Williams
APOOO BookClub
