Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

IMMORALITY ACT, NO. 5 OF 1927

  To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto.

  BE IT ENACTED by the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa, as follows:–

  Any European male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a native female, and any native male who has illicit carnal intercourse with a European female … shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years.

  Any native female who permits any European male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her and any European female who permits any native male to have illicit carnal intercourse with her shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to imprisonment for a period not exceeding four years…

  Ironically, almost twenty years to the day since the National Party’s 1950 amendment to the 1927 Immorality Act (extending the ban on sex between whites and blacks to include all non-whites), a sex scandal involving several enthusiastic supporters of the National Party would strike at the very core of the colour bar when it hit the small Free State town of Excelsior. Seven local Afrikaner farmers and businessmen and fourteen black women were arrested and charged under the Act, after a number of mixed-race children were born in the neighbouring township of Mahlatswetsa. Such was the stigma attached to interracial sex that the backwater town became world renowned, with the Chicago Tribune featuring the story in its 2 December issue of 1970.

  ‘If an atom bomb had been dropped on our town, it could not have had a greater impact,’ one elderly farmer says. Asked to describe Excelsior and its 700 white residents, he said: –

  ‘Well, let me put it this way. This is an Afrikaner’s town. There are no foreigners here. We had two Greeks, but they left.’ The law has shattered many lives outside Excelsior in recent years. A Cape Town judge jailed a 38-year-old white father of four for four months for conspiring to commit immorality with his mulatto maid … Sometimes judgments seem odd. Two white men were acquitted but two black women charged with them were tried separately and convicted.

  Almost precisely ten years after the Excelsior outrage, my biological parents would create their own scandal. Doing one of the most natural things one human being can do with another, they too played out the very thing the architects and supporters of apartheid feared the most. A mixing of the races. A merging of black and white. Such a union, and more so the issue of such a union, served only to undermine in the strongest possible way the entire system on which apartheid was based. In their own way, the white British ewe and the black South African ram challenged the very essence of institutionalised racism that former South African prime minister, and the so-called mastermind of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd, sought to create: the maintenance of white domination and the separation of the races. The Immorality Act was eventually repealed in 1985, five years after my birth, but not before thousands of people had been convicted for having sex across the colour line.

  By the time my biological parents had begun to make the beast with two backs, Nelson Mandela was already languishing in prison on Robben Island, sixteen years into a life sentence for committing sabotage against the apartheid government. PW Botha was heading up the National Party and racial tensions were just a few years away from becoming the worst the country had ever seen. But in a well-to-do enclave in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, my biological mother was doing her bit to improve race relations.

  Born in the North of England in 1957, my biological mother, Kris, found herself in South Africa because of a man. She had met Ken while they were both studying at the same college in the South of England in the late seventies. She had transferred from a college in the North to one in the county of Berkshire where Ken was also a student. His parents had emigrated to South Africa when he was three, but when he was seventeen he had decided to go back to the UK to complete his education.

  Five years afters arriving back in England, and having finished his studies, Ken decided to return to South Africa to work for his parents. They had built a successful career for themselves in the catering industry and his father had achieved an influential position in a chain of hotels. And so, at the age of twenty-one, having been dating Ken for two years, Kris agreed to go back with him and they both began working in the affluent area of Sandton in Johannesburg, him managing his father’s restaurant, she as head housekeeper at the popular Balalaika Hotel.

  The Sandton of the time was not the Sandton of today, which now boasts the title of ‘Africa’s richest square mile’. There were very few office blocks, the roads were suburban and there were no multiple lanes of traffic clamouring and careering through the city. At the time it was still little more than a residential suburb and Sandton City, considered today to be the ‘Rodeo Drive’ of Africa, sprawling with exclusive stores and upmarket eateries, was just a small shopping mall. The Balalaika was just around the corner in Sandown and was a well-known and well-liked ‘country’ hotel, popular with locals.

  It was at the Balalaika that Kris met my biological father, Jackson ‘Jackie’ Tau (Tau means ‘lion’ in Sesotho) who, she would once describe in a letter to me as ‘different’ and ‘a cut above the others’, but unable to reach his full potential because of the politics of the time. He was thirty years old and head chef of the hotel restaurant. Jackson was married, with a wife who lived in the ‘homelands’, most likely QwaQwa (which translates as ‘whiter than white’), the region created by the apartheid government for Basotho people, as I’m told my father was. The homelands, or Bantustans, formed the cornerstone of apartheid policy and the white minority government’s desire to divide and rule. Residential areas were segregated by means of forced removals. The black majority was stripped of their citizenship and, depending on their ethnic group, assigned to the relevant, tribally based ‘self-governing’ homelands. But, being a largely mountainous area and less than suitable for cultivation, most of the men of QwaQwa left to become part of the migrant labour force, providing cheap labour for white-owned businesses.

  At the time I was born Jackson already had one child, a daughter. He later had a son.

  I have just one picture of my biological father, sent to me by Kris, more than twenty years after it was taken. It was the only one she had, she wrote, and she had kept it in an album from that time. In the picture, his head is turned to the side, allowing only for a side profile.

  My father is half a face. An ear to match my own, the tight kink of my Leo’s mane, the too-wide African nose that belongs to his face, but that is unwelcome on mine. An eye, a forehead, my lips, a chin. We have identical hands. My father reminds me of myself, but only the good parts. If all the black and swill and spit and mire had come from her, then the light, the glow and the music must have come from him. In my mind his voice sounds like sugar beet, soaked overnight, heavy and thick. It is an adagio. Although, to the best of my knowledge, my father never met me, if I close my eyes I can hear him singing and see him cradling me on his forearm while he smokes a cigarette.

  Thula thul, thula baba, thula sana, Thul’ubab uzobuya, ekuseni. Thula thul, thula baba, thula sana, Thul’ubab uzobuya, ekuseni.

  (Hush, hush, hush-a-bye little man, Be quiet, baby, Be quiet, Daddy will be back in the morning. Hush, hush, hush-a-bye little man, Be quiet, baby, Be quiet, Daddy will be back in the morning.)

  I like to imagine that when he walked into a room, he did so with his eyes up, his feet unapologetic, his chest proud. When they called him ‘kaffir’ he would smile. When they smiled and called him Jackson, he would raise a correcting finger and say ‘Mr Tau’, and when they called him ‘kaffir’ again, he would, in turn, smile again. I pretend I know my father. I pretend to know that his greatest desire in life was to be a good man. That his indiscretion with my biological mother didn’t mean he loved his wife any less. Rather, he saw someone breaking, ready to shatter, and felt compelled to protect her. In my mind my father is Othello.

  Despite it bein
g virtually unheard of for black and white people to be friends, my biological father and Kris, in her words, ‘got to know’ each other and started jogging together in the early morning before work.

  In one of the three letters I ever received from Kris she once said of their relationship:

  Absolutely no one guessed that what appeared to be just a couple of hotel staff becoming friends was in fact a deep and understanding relationship. And while the relationship grew, Ken and myself grew more and more distant.

  The relationship continued, the threat of imprisonment apparently not enough to prevent them embarking on their perilous tryst and eventually, in the December of 1979, my biological mother became pregnant with me. Choosing not to disclose her affair, Kris told Ken of the pregnancy and they married shortly after, exactly five months before I was born. None the wiser as to her secret, both Kris and Ken’s white families looked forward to their first grandchild.

  Ken, believing the child his new wife was carrying was his, was apparently ‘overjoyed’ at the prospect of becoming a father, but Kris carried the nagging, shameful doubt that the baby growing inside her was the result of her affair with Jackson.

  My relationship with Jackson came to an end when it was discovered I was pregnant, but he saw no reason that it should, and he did not want to believe that there was even the remotest possibility that I was carrying his child.

  For the duration of her pregnancy she hid her terrible secret, confiding only in her doctor, who of course was unable to prove my paternity until after I was born. My future rested entirely on my race. As it was, when I was eventually pulled from her on the winter’s evening of 1 August 1980, it was apparently not immediately clear that I was Jackson’s child and I was pronounced a ‘white’ baby, given the name Karoline, and believed to be the first child of an unknowingly cuckolded, but apparently delighted Ken. To this day, it is his name that appears on my birth certificate.

  Over the years I often tried to imagine the conversation that must have taken place between Kris and Ken when thinking of a name for me. These regressive fantasies were one of the perverse ways I’d torment myself when the aching, unyielding agony of the unknown became too much to endure.

  I imagine the pair of them, like poorly rehearsed movie stars, awkwardly acting out the scene in a plush bedroom filled with congratulatory cards, grand furniture and thick shag-pile carpets. They are young and rich and good-looking, but their Hollywood life is days away from crashing into a low-budget made-for-TV movie. It is 3 August 1980, three days since I entered the world (eight days earlier than expected), cut from the mother’s womb by the doctor’s knife. Mother and baby have been allowed to return home. Ken walks out of the bathroom into the bedroom, oblivious to the wet shadows his feet are leaving on the carpet. A white towel is around his waist, his upper body still red and damp from the shower. She stares at the freckles on his shoulder and imagines how it would feel to suffocate one’s own baby.

  He stands over the two of them, mother and newborn; he’s carrying a large portable phone, grinning, with his toothbrush wedged into the side of his mouth.

  ‘That was the old man,’ he nods his head in the direction of the phone. ‘Says to tell you well done, good job, next one will be a boy.’

  He bends down and peers at the baby, milk-drunk on the mother’s breast. Kris inhales sharply. ‘Next one?’ she says incredulously, shaking her head despairingly. He pretends not to notice. ‘Katy, Kitty, Kadance …’ he muses, letting the towel drop to the floor.

  The radio hums in the background, playing the number-one hit by local female vocal group, Joy. The song is an anthem for South Africa’s struggle movement and the lyrics speak to the burgeoning sense of unrest in the country. The women sing of burning bridges, blazing skies and a woman weeping while a man lays beaten, but also of the promise of better days, which are to be found down the elusive ‘Paradise Road’.

  ‘I like Joy,’ she breathes into the room. Steam has begun creeping under the bathroom door.

  He turns to face her, his cock erect and aggressive. She baulks. ‘Karoline!’ he announces, winking at the sleeping baby. ‘Ken, Kris and Karoline! With a K.’

  [Fade to black.]

  Of course none of this really happened. I was given the name Karoline, Karoline Mary, because both Kris and Ken liked the name and wanted to keep up the tradition of Ks in their respective families. Mary was in honour of Ken’s great-grandmother who turned ninety-nine the day I was born.

  Kris and I eventually left hospital on 9 August. In those days, a new mother stayed in hospital a lot longer than she would today, but even after nine days, I have been told, there was no sign that I was not the child Kris had hoped I would be. The story goes that it wasn’t until I was three weeks old that she began to see signs that Jackson, and not Ken, was my father. It seems unbelievable, from her side at least, given what she knew, that she would not have realised sooner, instantly even, but so it was that nearly a month went by before my true paternity came to reveal itself.

  A referral letter from a paediatrician at Sandton Clinic to child welfare authorities in the UK states:

  This is to certify that I saw this child at it’s [sic] Caesar on 1.8.80. Mother’s first pregnancy which was normal … The main problem here was the paternity of this child as we were concerned initially whether this was in fact a Caucasian or non-Caucasian baby. Most of the features were those of a Caucasian baby, the things against it were a slightly flattened nose, a rather darkened vulva and darkened areolas.

  Kris considered leaving both South Africa and Ken, and returning to England to decide what to do, but in the end, after a night of candour, reprisals, questions and answers, she confessed her sins to her husband. The husband who had soothed, bathed, played with, loved as his own the child fathered by another man, a black man, employed at his own father’s hotel, just a few short months before his wedding.

  Where many men in Ken’s situation may have left the marriage, he decided to stay. Years later I would ask him why. ‘I loved her,’ he had told me. ‘But also I wanted to save face.’ Kris, he said, had not been very well liked by his family and perhaps he felt he had a point to prove.

  And so, because Ken stuck around, so did the problem, the problem child, and desperate times required a solution to be found to rectify the problem.

  CHAPTER 3

  Killing Karoline

  * * *

  After Kris’s revelation, it was decided that the only option in the circumstances was to have me, Karoline, adopted – and because of the laws in South Africa at the time, the adoption would have to take place ‘overseas’, in England. Had they given me up in South Africa, questions would have been asked, charges possibly filed and both Kris and Jackson could have been sent to prison. My future, as I have often been reminded, would likely have been to end up in a ‘coloured’ children’s home. Numerous times I have been told that I should be grateful for having avoided such a fate. Kris once wrote, ‘You would not be living the life you have now.’

  Once it was decided that I was to be adopted, a reason, of course, had to be given for why I so urgently needed to be taken overseas. Like many babies, I was born with slight jaundice and it was this jaundice that would be efficacious in ensuring my departure from South Africa went unquestioned. Together with a paediatrician at Sandton Clinic, who knew the real reason for my having to disappear, and being someone they felt they could trust, Kris and Ken concocted a story that I was suffering a rare kidney disease, symptomised by jaundice, that required a level of medical expertise and treatment only available at London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. A referral letter was written, tears were shed by Ken’s parents, who remained dumb to the truth, and on 18 September, Kris, Ken and baby Karoline arrived in the UK.

  They did, as they had said they would, take me to Great Ormond Street, but to see the medical social worker, not the doctors. They explained the situation to the social worker and she put them in touch with the British Agencies For A
doption and Fostering, which immediately contacted the Independent Adoption Service (IAS). The IAS told Kris about a couple who wanted to adopt a baby girl of mixed-race parentage.

  In the short time between that first appointment at the offices of the IAS and the day I was given up, Kris and Ken stayed with friends and in hotels, and also visited her parents in her hometown in the North. They confided in her parents the true nature of their visit to England, but not to her sister Karla, who was sixteen at the time. For those few days, the pair lived something of a double life, continuing their façade with Ken’s concerned parents who stayed in regular contact from Johannesburg. The story of my final days with Kris and Ken is detailed in a letter from the social worker, written just over a year after I was given up:

  Kris continued to give you every care although as time went by she knew that the day when she must part with you was coming nearer and she felt under increasing stress dreading the moment of parting. When [they] finally bought you to this office, Kris was extremely upset and distressed to part with you and I know that this was a tragic moment in her life.

  Kris was apparently watching from a car parked outside when Angela and Malcolm came for me. She watched as two complete strangers walked in through the door and instantly, unconditionally and proudly fell in love with her baby. According to paper work from the agency, Kris was ‘incredibly distressed’ when the time came for us to part. Strangely (or maybe not), I find this information comforting. The thought that she dumped me and disappeared without shedding so much as a tear is unthinkable.

  On 10 October, just ten days after handing me over, Ken and Kris left England to return to their lives in South Africa. But of course, they were to return without ‘their’ baby.