I have since been informed that petty apartheid covered the more ‘minor’ aspects of apartheid, such as the Immorality Act and those laws that restricted access by black people to ‘whites only’ beaches, parks etc.

While I was growing up, I never knew anything about apartheid, my first knowledge only came, really, when I was around 19 and my friend went to Rhodes and became a political activist. But this only impinged on the periphery of my life and I thought she was doing it to be different, or to make some kind of statement, and as she was there and I was still in our suburb, what she got up to, thought, believed or did had even less impact as time went on.

Of course I knew that black people were not allowed on beaches or in parks, but that, to me, was just normal life. I never noticed anything inconvenient, wrong, untoward or in any way questionable about the laws that were in place at the time. I merely presumed that was how it was. Actually I never even thought about the laws as being laws, if you know what I mean. I never thought about politics, or legislation or any of that kind of thing.

My parents never discussed the politics of our country, they never discussed who they voted for, and I assume it was the Nats but I do not really know. We were an a-political family, through and through.

Black people were treated kindly in our house but we were taught by our mother that they were not as clean as we were; therefore they had to be given different cups to drink from and plates to eat off. All this, to me, was perfectly normal.

I never questioned why black people were not allowed to live in our suburbs. I never knew they were not allowed to live in our suburbs to be perfectly honest. I just assumed they stayed where they wanted to stay.

When I went to a private school we had black people in our class (only two at that time, in 1981) and again I never asked myself why they had not been in our government schools, presuming that as Afrikaners went to Afrikaans schools, so blacks must go to black schools.

This was the way life was.

I remember saying some of this on a forum I belonged to some years back and having a huge fight with a black woman who said there was no way I could ever have been unaware of what was going on in our country; but of course there was a way, we all grow up with our own version of reality and this was mine.

I never asked myself whether black people were badly treated, whether black people in other countries were allowed to own homes in white suburbs, walk, sit and holiday where white people did. Where you do not see a problem, you also do not envisage any solutions or raise any questions.

I am not weighed down with any guilt about all this today, either. I am in no way responsible for the choices and decisions of my government or my parents.

In Standard 9, in 1983, Mrs van der Walt was our Afrikaans teacher at Jeppe High School for Girls – that draughty institution of Kensington about which I have had much that was scathing to say in the past. But Mrs van der Walt clearly loved her language and her face would light up as she described the meaning of the poems or stories she read, and when moved she would come close to tears, always taking the time to explain, or to draw from us, her audience, the same kind of appreciation for the words and meaning as she herself felt.

This was the first time the penny really dropped for me. Being a lover of language, theatre, drama, words and meanings as I was, I could hardly fail to succumb to the spell cast by writing such as this, for example:

“Finis
Nou maak ek self nie meer so baie saak nie
want jy’t bobbejaan na my gestuur met ’n briefie in sy bek

dit was geskryf op varkensblaar
dit was ’n bietjie dof
dit was om my en jou te nooi
na die Apies se bruilof

Jy het al die liedjies van my kindertyd weer in my laat sing
en in my hart die Jakkalse elke dag laat trou
Maar wat sal jy van my kan saamneem?
Miskien wanneer die lewe met jou kotiljons
en lekker wals op die Apies se bruilof
sal jy onthou dat jy vir my Aprilmaand was
– die wolke altyd bietjie voor die son –
en ek ten spyte van die reën kon lag
En jy sal lag

– Lina Spies

Mrs van der Walt would read a stanza to us, then leave the words floating in the air, asking us to consider them, their meaning; and in the way mercury might be held in a dream, we tried (and sometimes succeeded) in completely grasping what the words actually meant, not only in terms of the literal translation.

As the words wove their elegant way into my mind it was as though a door previously tightly shut began to creak open. Slowly and surely, lesson after lesson would open the door a little more and I would begin to glimpse the extraordinary power of a language I had all but ignored, if not sneered at, up until then.

I don’t know when I discovered Herman Charles Bosman but I know I have my parents to thank for that, and they would take us to see Patrick Mynhardt in his classic Oom Schalk Lourens role, raconteur, comic, dry as biltong and tough as leather with that silver current of high humour running through his every nuance. Amazing!

That was when I began to appreciate the story-telling abilities of the Afrikaner and my understanding broadened at a rapid rate thereafter, as I made sure I exposed myself in my early adult life to Afrikaans plays, experimental theatre, and Afrikaans music and so on.

Not sure why the Afrikaans people are looked on as coming from a cultural backwater or was it only me who ever looked at them like that?

That was something of a revelation for me, in terms of now analysing my own feelings about South Africa when I was growing up. As I cogitated on these words I realised we had never grown up in a “South African” family. No emphasis was ever placed on the fact that we were South African; no one in the family was sports mad, no one was glued to televisions shouting support for our team; no on waved flags; in fact we never even owned a flag. I was never taught the anthem until I got to primary school; speaking Afrikaans was quietly not done, we never had and were never encouraged to have Afrikaans friends.

Both my maternal and paternal extended families were throwbacks from England and the culture and ideals we were taught or which came to us through osmosis, were very English. We were exposed to a much more Eurocentric culture too, in terms of the films we were taken to watch, the music and theatre we were exposed to, and the pursuits we followed.

Without any specific instructions or directions being passed down, the idea of South Africa and of being South African was understood, somewhat sub-consciously, to be infra-dig.

Thus it was that I spent the first twenty six or twenty seven years of my life being slightly embarrassed to belong to such a backward country (I was not thinking here or really aware of its politics, was thinking chiefly of its culture) and I knew that should I ever head overseas the last place I would claim to come from would be South Africa.

To my mind – which had (I now see) been smoothed and pointed and guided down the emerald green paths of the English countryside rather than into the khaki grey ochre bosveld of my homeland – I’d far rather be taken for English or even Australian than being connected with boorish backwater people from a land no one knew existed.

Slowly as I grew older and started to read and be exposed to South African poetry, ideas, film and stories, I came to understand that my land did have its own story to tell, but I was still resistant to the idea of identifying myself as South African. All of these feelings existed on a subtle plane within my mind – not often acknowledged, certainly never inspected or analysed – and were never an active part or conscious part of my growing up or day to day experiences.

In 1994 in the midst of the greatest changes we as a country had ever seen, I was a young mother, alone in South Africa while my closest family lived in England. I was pretty caught up in my own day to day experiences but I do remember the day I read that we were to have a new flag.

I was suddenly outraged, maybe there was something of the dog-in-a-manger about my reaction; certainly I had never realised or thought I was attached to the previous flag in any way, but now that I knew they (uncertain who they was, in my mind) were taking it away I wanted very much to be a South African, and I wanted to understand my country, and I wanted to learn about all that I had missed. I felt a new flag would mean I had lost this country I had suddenly come to love.

In all this emotional upheaval and confusion, I realised one thing clearly: I am now a South African, if I never was one before.

It’s too simplistic to end here but I have reached my word limit; I shall explore this reaction at greater length in articles to come.