Our days were filled with building our own farms yards and hide-outs and learning each other’s games, languages and customs. We played cricket and football and went horse riding together or joined our fathers in the veldt. But meal times and after hours were spent with our own families. Our milk and meat came from the same source and we both dreaded our inoculations from the sister in her travelling clinic. You were taught to treat me with respect, I was taught to treat you with the same respect. We were too young to understand that we were different because of our skin colour, but we understood that my parents could afford a car because my dad owned the land we lived on.

Then one day our worlds became bigger than the farm we knew so well. We had to be educated, we had to go to school . Your school was on the neighbouring farm, but I had to go to the big school in town. You could walk the 5km to learn to read and write, while I had to be driven the 30km with my suitcase. You could walk home again after school, but I had to stay in the hostel until Friday afternoon.

I didn’t want to go to my school; I wanted to go to your school. I wanted to walk back home and steal figs with you or swim in the dam when it was hot. I wanted to eat the food your mom made for my family (not the horrid stuff they fed us in boarding school) and I wanted to sleep in my warm bed. But I wasn’t allowed to join them join you at the farm school BECAUSE I AM WHITE.

Slowly it dawned on me how things really worked in the world beyond our farm. I can’t go to your school because I am white, you can’t go to my church because you are black. You can’t buy the house next to my grandmother’s in town, not because you couldn’t afford it, but because you are not white. You are not allowed to shop in the same shops as my mom, but could buy your groceries in the part of town I wasn’t allowed to go to because it was “dangerous”. There are many things you couldn’t do that I took for granted. I am only now starting to realise how different our people were treated.

I go back to farm now for holidays, but very little has changed. We still treat each other with the same mutual respect. My dad is still the baas, but you are now a farm worker alongside my brother. A lot has altered in the world outside our kingdom; our children will now be able to go to the same school, our families greet each other while shopping in the same shops, we can all worship whichever God we want to in whichever church building we prefer and some of the houses in my grandmother’s old neighbourhood have black families living there. These changes were not always easy, yet it was natural.

I am a little sad though – the school on the farm next door had to close down. The money that was meant for the teacher’s salary disappeared with the school books. Instead all the farm children, regardless of skin colour, have to stay in town during the week.