Now you know why I didn't stay in South Africa

"SKIN" is one of the most bizarre and moving true stories to emerge from apartheid South Africa: Sandra Laing was a black child born in the 1950s to two white Afrikaners, unaware of their black ancestry. Her parents were rural shopkeepers serving the local black community, who lovingly brought her up as their 'white' little girl. But at the age of ten, Sandra was driven out of white society. The film follows Sandra's thirty-year journey from rejection to acceptance, betrayal to reconciliation, as she struggles to define her place in a changing world - and triumphs against all odds.

 

I was searching YouTube for a trailer, perhaps even a full-length copy of the Australian movie "The Skin of Others" when I came across this one, "Skin", a British-South African 2008 biographical film about Sandra Laing, a South African woman born to white parents, who was classified as "Coloured" during the apartheid era, presumably due to a genetic case of atavism.

 

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Based on the book "When She Was White - The True Story of a Family Divided by Race" by Judith Stone, it displays all the ugliness of the apartheid era. This horrible and often quite arbitrary racial segregation still existed when I lived and worked in South-West Africa in 1968/69, and it made me leave again despite the great beauty of the country.

When apartheid came to an end, there was renewed interest in Sandra's story by the media. Sandra's mother saw Sandra interviewed on television and wrote to her to tell her of her father's death two years earlier. The letter provided no return address nor any other clue as to her whereabouts, but receiving it prompted Sandra to renew her search. She found her mother living in a nursing home and the two were happily reunited (although her two brothers continued to refuse to see her).

Oh, and Sam Neill does a passable imitation of the Afrikaner accent!

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