Learning to swim

“When I was a child growing up in the village, I didn’t even know we were oppressed. You saw that the white man came by in a fancy car and that the black man always drove an old broken car, but you thought that’s just the way it was meant to be. You called the white man Nkosi (boss) and his son Nkososana (little boss), and you lifted your hat when they went past. That was just the way it was. We enjoyed our lives. We didn’t see the oppression," says Jimmy Selani, South Africa's Best Emerging Guide of the Year 2004, and our guide for the first day of the hike. Usually Jimmy treads the whole 61km, but in December he puts his feet up and gives young guides a chance to make some money to pay towards their education.

His words take me back to the first time someone in Europe asked me what it was like to growing up under apartheid. No one had ever asked me before, and I didn’t know how to answer. What was it like? It was like ordinary everyday life. Like Jimmy, I didn’t see the oppression.

Black people rode on different buses because they lived in different places to us and those buses didn’t go to where I lived, so I didn’t ride on them. Black people had a different entrance to the shops because they ate different food to us and they sold that other food in the other part of the shop. It sounds impossibly naïve now, and it makes me cringe to admit it, and even makes me doubt my adult critical reasoning faculties, but that was just the way it was.

You were a child growing up in a country where the press was censored; where sanctions, for all their good, also made us isolated from international debate. In fairness, I have South Africa friends who also say to me “I can’t believe you didn’t know”. But they were privileged to be the children of professors and politically astute, educated people. My parents were economic refugees from the imploding hard industry of Yorkshire, crushed under the mighty fist of Mrs Thatcher. They’d got married at 19, had three children, and in 1982 when I was 5, after two years of being on the dole (a great shame in those days), my dad found a job making beer bottles in Olifantsfontein. We never had a black maid because my mother believed you must clean your own house. That’s how it’s done in Yorkshire and that’s how it was done in our Yorkshire bubble in Benoni.

A child’s life isn’t like anything other than the life it is. We’ve got so much to take in, in those early years, we have to take a lot at face value, otherwise we’d never get off the ground. I wish I could say I was a child of the struggle. I wish I’d been old enough to protest in the 1980s and wear defiant T-shirts. But I was busy learning to swim.