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into that club.
Colored people had it rough. Imagine: You’ve been brainwashed into believing that your
blood is tainted. You’ve spent all your time assimilating and aspiring to whiteness. Then, just
as you think you’re closing in on the finish line, some fucking guy named Nelson Mandela
comes along and flips the country on its head. Now the finish line is back where the starting
line was, and the benchmark is black. Black is in charge. Black is beautiful. Black is powerful.
For centuries colored people were told: Blacks are monkeys. Don’t swing from the trees like
them. Learn to walk upright like the white man. Then all of a sudden it’s Planet of the Apes,
and the monkeys have taken over.
—
So you can imagine how weird it was for me. I was mixed but not colored—colored by
complexion but not by culture. Because of that I was seen as a colored person who didn’t
want to be colored.
In Eden Park, I encountered two types of colored people. Some colored people hated me
because of my blackness. My hair was curly and I was proud of my Afro. I spoke African
languages and loved speaking them. People would hear me speaking Xhosa or Zulu and
they’d say, “Wat is jy? ’n Boesman?” “What are you, a Bushman?” Why are you trying to be
black? Why do you speak that click-click language? Look at your light skin. You’re almost
there and you’re throwing it away.
Other colored people hated me because of my whiteness. Even though I identified as
being black, I had a white father. I went to an English private school. I’d learned to get along
with white people at church. I could speak perfect English, and I barely spoke Afrikaans, the
language colored people were supposed to speak. So colored people thought that I thought I
was better than them. They would mock my accent, like I was putting on airs. “Dink jy, jy is
grênd?” “You think you’re high class?”—uppity, people would say in America.
Even when I thought I was liked, I wasn’t. One year I got a brand-new bike during the
summer holidays. My cousin Mlungisi and I were taking turns riding around the block. I was
riding up our street when this cute colored girl came out to the road and stopped me. She
smiled and waved to me sweetly.
“Hey,” she said, “can I ride your bike?”
I was completely shocked. Oh, wow, I thought, I made a friend.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
I got off and she got on and rode about twenty or thirty feet. Some random older kid
came running up to the street, she stopped and got off, and he climbed on and rode away. I
was so happy that a girl had spoken to me that it didn’t fully sink in that they’d stolen my
bicycle. I ran back home, smiling and skipping along. My cousin asked where the bicycle was.
I told him.
“Trevor, you’ve been robbed,” he said. “Why didn’t you chase them?”
“I thought they were being nice. I thought I’d made a friend.”
Mlungisi was older, my protector. He ran off and found the kids, and thirty minutes later
he came back with my bike.