Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.

One of the fascinating stories of formerly enslaved people who started trading on their own and building wealth is that of a woman called Angela from Bengal in India. Angela was also known as Angila, Ansiela, Ansla and Hansela. She had arrived in the Cape together with her husband and three children, shipped to the Cape by a Batavian landdrost, Pieter Kemp. He then sold the family to Van Riebeeck. In 1662, Van Riebeeck sold Angela to Abraham Gabbema was promoted to a post in Batavia. He then liberated Angela and her three children. No mention is made of her husband from India. After she was freed, Angela was given land in Heerestraat with a title deed signed by one Cornelis van Quaelbergen. Part of the conditions for liberation included understanding and speaking the Dutch language, being a confirmed Christian and a member of a church.

Chapter 1: Umntu Akalahlwa: The Months Before

“It wasn’t enough to see that something was wrong, her grandfather taught her. It was imperative to do something about it.

If you ask my mum today when she first became aware of apartheid, she will tell you it was a teenager, when she became involved with the Black Consciousness movement. But some of her earliest memories are of white police raiding homes in her neighbourhood looking for Black men who did not have permission to be in the area. At eight years old she watched as long lines of men shackled to each other were forced to walk the streets of the township, before being loaded into police vans.

Chapter 8: What Apartheid Could Not Penetrate: Family

To say that we were missed in Soweto feels like an inadequate and flimsy way of describing the rupturing of hearts and scarring of the souls of those who loved us. For the family in Diepkloof, it followed a series of deep losses, first my great-grandfather, then my great-grandmother, then my mother and me. In Orlando East, the family put on a brave face. Life went on because it had to. They tried to place their grief behind a locked door, but it was still there. We were alive, so my uncles and aunts told themselves they were not grieving. But what else do you call the loss of a child who is the flesh of your flesh, and a sister-in-law who had become like blood? Rakgadi says it is the alternative that would have crushed her; her brother or sister-in-law imprisoned or worse, and me robbed of my parents.