I grew up in a not so wealthy family. Life when I was younger was not easy, but those challenges came with such great lessons. Without poverty we never would’ve learnt how to share, we never would’ve learnt the peace that comes with contentment and we never would’ve learnt the joy in surrounding yourself with people that love you and that you love. 

For primary school I went to 3 separate schools with two different approaches to life. The first school was a local school with government education and teachers on government payroll. Every student was from the local community or the outskirts of the local community. By local I mean the township that I grew up in. Although life was hard for all of us, or most of us, a day spent in school with friends took away all the troubles and the differences we had based on which household had a TV and which didn’t. Actually I remember how my street rep improved when my mom bought a Telefunken TV. That TV at the time, was one of those with a very big butt and it had a remote control that you could play games with. It was also a color-tv and that’s how I saw for the first time, the actual distinction amongst races. I only knew of different races through television. I had never met a white person, an Indian, Chinese or any other race for that matter until I changed schools. 

The second school I went to was a mixed race school. I was the second in my family to go to a mixed race school! My mother did this for us, to help break away from the belief that the township was all there was to life. My sister had been the first. I had always found it interesting how it seemed like her personality changed over the years of her schooling there. One time my sister had come home with a three or four page speech entitled ‘mind your language’. It was my sister who taught me about something called public speaking, something for the elite at the time, at least so we thought. Has the thought of the untapped potential locked away by lack in townships, ever crossed your mind? My sister gave me an interest to experience a life so different to the one I had always known, she made me believe in the impossible. Upon entering the second school I went to, I met white people, my class had a Chinese boy, and my teachers were different races. Suddenly my world changed. Being at that school taught me two major lessons; I was something called black and that came with perks or should I call them consequences and, a life outside of the one I had always known was very much possible. 

The differences amongst races became vividly evident starting in primary school and worsening in high school. Just by way of observing the cars that my friends were dropped off in and the amount of pocket money they had each time they came to school was a clear reminder of economic differences based on skin colour. I know this sounds very biased but that to me was how obvious it was. Very few black kids came from families as affluent as every other non-black kid during that time. I wondered why. 

Have you heard my latest single COLORS? It was during those early days that the paradigm behind this song was created. I couldn’t help but compare myself to other people who seemed to have been served a head start by the universe. 

I grew older, went to high school, experienced much more race-based segregation. At this point it became clear to me the role my skin colour would play in my later search for a better life after school. A lot of us who were forward-thinking had already started doing extra jobs on the side for pocket money and it was in these settings that race-based discrimination became pretty obvious to us. Amongst non-black communities there was always nepotism dominating the system and black people always did the industrial jobs. At the restaurant where I got my first job during high school no matter how good I was at the job I always rotated between front of house waiter and sushi chef, never manager. ‘Karen’ would have had to leave town for good, for me to become manager. Back in school, a few of the members of our public speaking and debating society were picked to represent the country at international level where young people discussed and resolved significant societal issues. One of our teammates came back from a trip to America with a horrible story of how some white kids had distracted him with monkey noises while he addressed the crowd one afternoon. We all laughed off the ignorance displayed by those kids thinking ‘bless, they’ve never seen a black intelligent kid before’, but I think that story changed all of us. ‘They see us as monkeys’ we thought. 

Because I moved around between countries growing up, a lot more social injustice became evident to me after I left school. There was black on black violence on the streets, there were xenophobic attacks amongst fellow Africans, all the while a marginalisation of races in the work place. I literally wished I’d never left school, at least there I was safe from all of this. But the reality was I now had to protect myself and my loved ones from the madness of the system, because there was little I could do to make the significant change I wanted to see in the systems that govern us, or the ignorance of the powerful few. Protecting myself and my loved ones had nothing to do with becoming violent or learning how to hold a gun. My approach was an intelligible one where I chose to rather educate myself beyond what the classroom taught me, to look for all the secrets that they would rather hide from us, then educate myself and those around me on these things. 

Years later, it bothered me that even though I had done a great job at achieving a certain level of education, systematic excellence was was still limited to a select few. ‘The system is rigged’ I thought. So I had a chat with a friend back home about how I was feeling and asked for advise. He had lived through the South African Apartheid Era you see, so he had a wholistic perspective to all of this. We spoke this out and in the end he had me read a few books, which i would recommend that you get a hold of for your own good; 

Decolonizing the mind- Ngugi Wa Thiongo (actually anything my Ngugi) 
The Wretched of the Earth - Franz Fanon 

These two books changed my life. I later discovered that those were some of the books that were read by freedom regime leaders in Africa during the times of the liberation struggle. You know which other book you should get your hands on? 

Still Grazing - Hugh Masekela 

All the reading made me realise that the race-based struggle has been a lifelong one that began with colonialism. The role of religion in all this is fascinating to me, but that’s a conversation for another day. What I also realised was that the struggle of the African child with race is very different to the struggle of the coloured American with race. For awhile I thought this last observation was incorrect until I watched the movie black panther which depicted this observation almost accurately. But here is a lesson that this movie tried to teach and I’m wondering if you picked it up too- even though the struggle is different for the African, the African still needs to help people of colour being racially marginalised in other parts of the world. Be careful with the ‘it’s not my struggle’ line. Child, it’s OUR struggle. 

I was scrolling through Instagram the other day and I saw a very interesting quote by Will Smith; “Racism is not becoming worse, it’s just being filmed.” There is no better time for you and I to pay more attention to the televised revolution against race based segregation. If you look at the streets and you look through social media, you’ll know that the world has been hurting from this now-televised-struggle FOR YEARS. Now is a great time to speak out, to be heard and to make a change. 

This is my story, and I hope it helps you get perspective. 

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