By Abigail George

I don’t remember much about my past.

For a long time, in schools in Port Elizabeth. Swaziland and Johannesburg, I was very unhappy with myself. I thought my South African self had not turned out correctly. All neat around the edges. I had no identity to speak of, no culture, no tradition, no heritage, and most of all, no inheritance. I only had my mother’s and father’s genes on my side. So, to progress in life, I educated myself. I read all that I could. I was the proverbial square peg in a round hole all my life. This image or idea I had of myself was not an identity. It was a spoilt, dysfunctional identity that had no sound psychological framework.

Where did this child, a Coloured child of mixed race, belong? How did I become traumatised?

It is easy, to begin with the land question in retrospect, the politics of the day, the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the black majority not ruling the country, the white minority in power, and the Coloured playing the role of Moses in the wilderness. Nobody wants to talk about the intellectual abandonment of the Coloured people: the complete difficulty, complex and mysterious collapse of culture, identity, and consciousness over generations.

When I was in school, we were taught, as I am sure that children are still taught today, that time waits for no man, woman, or child. We should look to the future because we aren’t all children, as the song says, ‘the future,’ but there comes a time when you are an adult and wonder where all that time went. You realize that time flies. While studying history in high school, Bethelsdorp and the Kat River Settlement were not in the curriculum. It will still not be written about today, I am sure. There are no longer historians who are so up-to-date.

Why would they write about a vanishing tribe of people? A people who only exist as rock paintings.

Rock paintings on the walls of caves in Bethelsdorp, Nelson Mandela Bay. There are no hiking trails to mark their position. No tourists flock to these caves, but my father, an educationalist, has seen these caves. He wants to take me there. This is our shared history, not just a living legacy.

As a child, I knew nothing of the London Missionary Society. Even less about the scourge of apartheid and the promulgation of the Group Areas Act. The cause and effect of emotional damage that trauma can cause. What happens to the genius, the creativity of a marginalised, disadvantaged, disenfranchised generation? What do we, as a people, as a ‘tribe’ relate to? We have inherited a culture. Remember these words. The Kat River Settlement. Apartheid. Detention. Banning. Dennis Brutus. Stephen Biko. Kwame Nkrumah. Franz Fanon. Black Consciousness. Frank Talk. Bethelsdorp. The promulgation of the Group Areas Act. W.E. Du Bois. Bantu Education. Azania.

For a long time, I was openly distrustful of the world as an adolescent. I have always been an introvert, withdrawn, reserved, and uneasy towards people of other races and faiths. Still, then democracy and three presidents in that democracy changed all of that. I am still sensitive, but it is a healthy sensitivity. Beyond the trauma, I now know of a novel world.

A world that is beautiful in perpetuity, full of opportunity and breakthroughs, but the trauma has never left me.

Not entirely, though. Perhaps I must understand God’s darkness and light to understand His people. I have to live in this world and praise it simultaneously, and I cannot reject the youth who find no escape from their sorrow. I, too, have a dream in the final analysis. That my people, my tribe, would become spiritually significant. That the Coloured youth would become productive members of society.

Contribute positive outcomes and be happy instead of being damaged and denying that this is how life should be—a violent fight song with a gun. Coloured trauma almost always involves the territory of drugs and violence. Coloured trauma is the sexual violence and rape. Coloured trauma is going to your child’s funeral, whom you must bury before you cross over. Coloured trauma is indecisiveness and not having choices. Coloured trauma is not a mystery. It is murder, aggression against your peers and family. I want to change my world, and how can I not do that by writing about it? I don’t know how and when things will change.

In this version of my life, I am both a student and a teacher, a leader and a follower, a poet and a writer.

And perhaps someday there will be others like me in the Northerns (the northern areas) who will be both a student and a teacher, a leader and a follower with potential, a poet and a writer, and an introvert.

Sources:

https://online.ucpress.edu/afterimage/article-abstract/48/2/9/117636/The-Color-of-Trauma?redirectedFrom=fulltext