Where are you from?

My family did the unthinkable: after
getting away with ‘playing white’ for some years, we went one step
further and ‘jumped the colour line’. By various obscure and not
well-documented processes, we changed our ‘racial classification’ from
‘coloured’ – as defined by the apartheid policy of the day –to that of
‘white’. We juggled colour … The price we paid was anguish, constant
fear of detectionand a sacrifice of family connectedness. The
decades-long process of becoming completely comfortable with my ultimate
identity was psychologically so unnerving that I have only recently
feltfree to talk about it. This is certainly the first time I ever write
about it.

Ulla Dentlinger’s life history begins in poor, rural apartheid
Namibia of the early 1950s. Growing up in the Rehoboth Baster territory,
she early on discovers that her parents are not prone to reminisce
about their family’s past. The most mundane information about their
background is guarded much like a state secret. As a child, she begins
to panic at being asked the question so normal to others: Where are you
from? Only in later years it dawns on her that she had to be a
‘Coloured’. The sense of conflict increases immeasurably. By then she is
growing up in apartheid South Africa, but now in a ‘white’ suburb of
Cape Town. She goes to a ‚white‘ school and bears herself in a German
fashion. She and her family had, in fact, jumped the colour line.
Returning to southern Africa from the United States in the 1990s, she
now openly pursues investigations into her family background. In this
book, Ulla Dentlinger portrays her wider family – some who simply
ignored ‘race’ and colour, others who opposed it and those who dodged or
tolerated it. Their intimate, painful or straight-forward stories and
recollections lead her to the emotional realization of the wealth of her
heritage and its final acceptance.