English version of my opinion piece in Die Burger 11/06/2011

I lived my young life always guarding my mouth, I let people say things like "no offence hey, but..." and nodded my head when they said "those black people man, not like you." And the older I became, the more I questioned things and the more I felt the need to empower myself to say something.

I never understood the depths of racism until the day my father shared his experiences of it with me. Before that I didn't even understand race. I thought we all looked different because we all spoke different languages. I can remember how tears would brim my eyes every time he spoke of the things that happened during those days. The older I became the more I wanted to know and understand how we as young people of different races truly saw each other. If white people truly hated black people in those days, did the white kids carry their parents hatred for black people around with them the same way I carried my parents pain around with me? It was clear to me now more than ever that we unconsciously carried the feelings our parents imposed on us about each other even though they did not want us to.

What structures like the TRC and now BEE have done good for some is good, but what about the rest of the masses who were affected and never had the chance to go through some kind of healing process or benefit from any of these? How does one let go of the past when every day, your current surrounding still resembles your past? And similarly when you are constantly reminded and often blamed for the effects of the past. We continue to fight a battle that was never ours to begin with, a battle that was fought and won on our behalf so that we could coexist in peace.

One of my closest friends did not know much about black people the day we met 5years ago. This was the same day we found out we would be living together. She asked me if she could sniff and taste my skin. This did not offend me, she needed to know for herself if all she had heard about black people was true or not. That put her curiosities about black people to rest and it proved that the differences between us were no different than the differences between her and another white friend. 

Today, I see racism as that beast that continues to evolve, the beast that we want to believe we have stained. It moulds and shapes itself in many ways and it seems to be a ghost that continues to haunt South Africa.  Maybe racism is still prevalent because people never healed from the effects of it. Those very effects now present themselves in the form of inequalities, classification of people, poverty, job scarcity, service delivery and so much more. Regardless of all the problems we face in South Africa, our strength lies in our diversity. The fact that we are racially and culturally different means that there are more ways than one to solve the problems we have, it means unique ways of looking at things and it means finding a way to understand each other.

As a young mother, everyday I think about the kind of South Africa I want to raise my daughter in. I think about the values I want to instill in her and how imp going to raise her to be a young woman that stands for what she believes in and does not wait for things to come her way but goes out and gets it. Most importantly I want to teach her not to hate but to love. I want to teach her to look beyond skin color but always be proud of who she is and where she comes from.