In a Post-Apartheid South Africa, I Was a Black Girl in an All-White World

Since before I was born, I was given the mantle of cycle-breaker. My parents, grandparents, and all before them were raised in impoverished townships in South Africa. I was part of the first generation to belong to the “whitehood”—my terminology for being raised in white institutions. My parents wanted to make sure I assimilated into this new post-apartheid society well, so I grew up speaking English and not much of my native tongue, Xhosa.

You would think this would be a good thing, that it would help. It didn’t. I was seen as an alien by white people, and an imposter by Black people.

From preschool to grade seven, I was the only Black child in all my classes. The school I was enrolled in had the enormity of a public school but the affluence of a private school. It wasn’t just that it was a majority-white school; it was an all-white school with Black kids peppered throughout other classes. Over the years, most of those Black kids transferred out. The difference between us was that they told their parents what they suffered. I didn’t.

I was never a shy kid. I was extroverted, energetic, and eager to make friends. I just never understood why my enthusiasm was never reciprocated. I was shunned by the white kids in my class. All the tables were organized into groups of eight, and I had the misfortune of occupying one of the seats in the center. Each individual table has examination boards: You slide it out from between the desks, turn it over and place it on the surface. It acts as a barrier so no one can copy from each other’s test papers. Throughout class, whether there was a test or not, the other kids would barricade me with the boards, front, flanks and the gaps in between.

You would think the teacher would rebuke this kind of treatment. Instead, every Friday, she would make a tally of who was good and who was bad. The good kids, all white, received a gift from the class goody box. For a whole year, I never received a gift from that teacher because somehow, for every week of the year, I misbehaved (even though I had no one to talk to, so it was impossible for me to cause a disruption). Yet I, the only Black child, along with three other mixed-race kids, were branded as delinquents.

I was seen as an alien by white people, and an imposter by Black people.

I had to accept that I was alone. Treated as a pariah, I savored my solitude when I was made to spend break-time by myself. Eventually, even that was robbed from me when the bullying began, in the form of harassment from the soccer boys, who were older and used me for their morbid amusement. It started with name-calling and escalated to emptying my lunchbox on the ground, pushing, and shoving, to the point of bruises. Even then, I never told anyone.

When I advanced to older grades, torment took a different form. There were new shades to racism that I was learning. When I wore braids, people would ask if it was horsetail hair, or if I got it from dead people. A white mother told me once, “You’re so pretty for a Black girl.” Instances like these dented my fortitude and warped my self-image as my upbringing was influenced by Westernized ideals of beauty. I never felt pretty enough and when I had crushes on white boys, I knew what they desired was long hair, light skin, and a thin body. Everything I was not.

I sought relief at home, but all I found was ridicule. Close relatives would judge me on the way I dressed, acted, and spoke, all examples of my “whitehood.” The relatives who lived in the townships believed me to be an aloof snob who thought herself superior, because I attended an all-white school and lived in a mostly white neighborhood. They thought of me as a coconut: brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Meanwhile, white people never quite accepted me. I behaved and sounded like them, but I would never be them. In college, I was partnered with two Afrikaans girls on a marketing project. One girl warned me that her father was a prison warden who hated Black people. I was hesitant to work with her, but she reassured me that her father would like me because I was “the right kind of Black.” I felt the silent but visceral distinction when I hung out with my white friends and their family, especially on occasions when I went away on holiday with them. I was among them, but I would never be a part of them.

I am now 24 years old, and I still deal with the consequences of my “whitehood” every day. When I go to any mall or store, most of the cash registers are operated by Black workers. After dealing with a queue of white patrons, they instantly speak Xhosa or Zulu to me and are shocked when I reply in English. Their astonishment turns into animosity very quickly. As a child, I was scorned for my broken Xhosa when I tried to speak. Now I am condemned for not speaking it at all. In high school, a boy once remarked, “You don’t speak like other Black people.”

The cultural clash between my heritage and my upbringing is the source of my ceaseless internal strife. I feel more connected and at ease with white people, instead of my own “kind.” All of my friends are white; I have only two Black friends. And every time I’m in a new public setting, I gravitate towards white people. They are all I know and whom I’m most comfortable with. 

Every time I’m around Black people at family reunions or family friends’ functions, I’m jeered at because of the way I talk. I can’t relate to them in any sense or topic, even music. And neither can they with me. A distant pain. I haven’t even bothered trying to become fluent in my home language or reconcile with my heritage. I’ve adopted so many white conventions, I feel there’s no room for anything else. And from how my own have treated me, I don’t want to accommodate anything else. I shouldn’t have to. In the liminal space between two worlds, I’ve discovered the freedom of belonging to neither.

I can’t change what others think of me, but I can control how I respond. Despite my white-inclined preferences, I’ve learned to see the beauty in both groups of people, observing white and Black households and being surprised to see similar overlaps. Even amidst the contradictions. Discrimination, culture, and custom have taught us that we are too different, but in the garden of humanity, each of us is rooted in the same soil.