The black woman – with white parents

Sandra Laing was born black, but to white parents. It would have been strange anywhere – but in apartheid South Africa it was disastrous. Long before science learned to meddle with genes, there was Sandra Laing.

She entered the world in 1955, a beautiful baby by all accounts, who could be expected to grow up in a close-knit family amid mines of gold and forests of pine. At the first sight of Sandra no one, not the nurse, her mother, father or neighbours would admit the obvious. Nature had played a trick. Abraham and Sannie Laing were white, their parents, grandparents and great grandparents were white, yet their daughter was dark. By a biological quirk, the pigment of an unknown black ancestor had lain dormant for generations and manifested in Sandra. Genetic throwbacks were not unheard of but if there was ever a wrong place and wrong time for this phenomenon, it was apartheid South Africa.

Her life is an extraordinary tale of a search for identity in a system built on race and prejudice, where home, school, job and sex life was demarcated by skin colour. Born to a conservative Afrikaner family, Sandra’s fate was to not be what she was supposed to be.

It has a happy ending, of sorts, and one which is scheduled to hit bookshops and cinemas now that Hollywood has caught wind of the story. The first biography is due out this year and a British production company has signed a deal with Miramax to make the film. Sandra Laing is about to become famous. Sitting in the back garden of her new house in Leachville, a maze of recently built estates fringing farmland east of Johannesburg, the bulky woman with the crew cut does not much resemble the svelte, toffee-coloured youngster who was photographed hugging a tall, white woman three decades ago. The psychological toll of her traumas has been immense, say friends, and Sandra, 47, is taciturn, the eye contact fleeting, the voice low. “I’m much happier with black people. I am, I was, very shy with white people. Even today I still think white people don’t like black people because of the way they treated me.” A mild way of putting things from someone who was expelled from school, mocked, abused, persecuted and told she was inferior, something less than fully human, because she lacked the pinkness expected of an Afrikaner descended from Dutch settlers. The nose and lips could be European but the skin is evidence of a liaison between a settler and native, perhaps as early as the 18th century.

“Sometimes I wonder how things might have been, what life might have been like, if I was born white. Mostly I try just to forget the past.” She speaks slowly, concentrating on each question, but it is clear she would rather play with the grandson resting on her knee, throw a ball to the dog, re-arrange shelves in the grocery shop, do anything other than an interview. Earlier she did smile, when 10 children with violins trooped into her shop, a converted front room of her house, and gave a concert to celebrate the new home and business which, it is hoped, will harbour a normal, stable life. Wellwishers and dignitaries of all colours made speeches to honour what they called a survivor, a symbol of triumph over despair. A performance by Zulu dancers drove the dog wild and Sandra even joined in the laughter.

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