Killing Karoline: What happens when the baby they buried comes back?

By Sara-Jayne King

The result of an illegal affair between a white British woman and black South African man, during apartheid, 'Karoline' is classified as 'white', but her true parentage soon emerges. At  6 weeks old she is secreted out of SA under the pretense of needing medical treatment in the UK. On returning, her biological mother says her newborn has died abroad. Karoline is adopted by a white British couple. Plagued by questions surrounding her identity, she returns 'home' at 26, to face her inner demons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Mar 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781928420040

Sara-Jayne King

Sara-Jayne Makwala King is a journalist and broadcaster, who holds an LL.B degree and an MA in Journalism. She currently hosts a show on Cape Talk and lives in Cape Town with her daughter and adopted dog, Siza.

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Prologue

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Cape Town, June 2008

‘Just don’t write a book about it.’

He had said it rather weakly, an even feebler attempt at levity in his voice. But the look on his face betrayed him. It was clear he wished it were within his power to stop it – whatever it was – going any further than it had already. We, all of us, had known that things would never be the same again, but only I seemed prepared for what was happening.

Surely they must have realised that this moment would come one day? Had they never talked about it, about what would happen? Prepared and rehearsed their lines, braced themselves for the return, the resurrection of Karoline? Had he not, over the years, predicted this exact scene, played it over in his mind countless times, as I had?

He continued to stare into his wine glass, as if hoping that the answers would miraculously be found swirling in the remnants of his Shiraz – his own vintage – or better, that the next two hours of our lives would simply evaporate into time and disappear like so much already had. He would be disappointed. I had been silent, hidden away for so long, but now I had come out of hiding. I had risen from the grave and I had a voice. It wasn’t that I had suddenly become brave, but rather that the time had come. A time not determined by me, but by something larger than all of us. There was nothing left to do but this.

There are moments in the short years we are given when that which we may once have considered the riskiest path of all becomes the surest ground on which we can walk. We still see the cracks, feel the tremors of the unsettled earth underfoot, and sense the presence of the fragile and unpredictable and recognise the sense of certainty. The knowledge that this is the path that we must take. And so, with our bootlaces tight, our armour secure, and holding firm to our resolve, we take the first step – and even if that on which we walk crumbles to dust, we know, we are sure we are headed in the right direction.

As I stood before him, for the first time in twenty-seven years, I was scared, yes, but mostly angry and, oddly, rather powerful. So what was it that I wanted? Acknowledgement? That age-old antithesis of self-deception? Don’t we all just want to be seen? To know that we’ve been heard, our experiences recognised, the essence of who we are valued and validated? If nothing else, did I not have a right to that at least? And there was really nothing else. But acknowledgement – elusive, beautiful, weight-shifting acknowledgement – was the stuff of fantasy, because the very reason we had come to be here was the result of a thing conceived in a bed of deception and denial. A refusal, an inability, an unwillingness to see.

So what was it that I wanted? Acceptance? George Orwell once wrote that ‘Happiness can only exist in acceptance’. Did that mean my happiness rested on their acceptance of me? I had been unhappy for so damn long, did I dare risk putting something so precious into the hands of those who had already been the cause of so much of my sadness?

What was it that I wanted? Control perhaps? That was possible. For the first time ever, for just a brief moment, I felt like I held the reins, that I was taking back command. I could ruin him if I wanted, I thought. But I knew I wouldn’t, and that angered me even more.

What was it that I wanted? Revenge? There was a time that I thought I did. But what would that revenge be? How? Revenge was a fantasy and one that, in reality, rarely delivered on its promise. And so instead I tried hard to look bored, to manifest my resentment into overt indifference; show him I couldn’t have cared less. I wanted the tension to be palpable.

I wandered around the apartment, his apartment musing at the predictability of it all. The expensive artwork, the mood lighting, the cream carpets and white leather sofas that made the place look like a show home. A façade. It was so … him. Not that I knew him, but I needed something on which to hang the disdain I’d been carrying with me ever since I’d walked through the door. I yawned widely, hoping I was managing to convey the appropriate level of boredom and apathy. If I’d been braver, I’d have lit a cigarette. It was clearly a non-smoking house. I was desperate for a glass of wine, or something stronger, but I hadn’t had a drink for close to a year.

Inwardly, I began to seethe, especially when he began to tell me about his plans for landscaping the roof garden, the convenience of being so centrally located, and … surely it wasn’t appropriate to play music? I was incensed. I sat and thought of how he’d welcomed me into the apartment, pulling me into a polite embrace. No, it was all far too presumptuous; who the hell did he think was?

And there it was. Because the irony of it was that this man, into whose life I had entered some twenty-seven years before, this man whom I needed to hate, but also needed to be acknowledged by, was, in a place and a time, my father. Whatever the truth was, it was this man whose name appeared in black and white on my birth certificate. But this man had killed me. This man and the woman who had carried me in her belly had killed me, and they had killed Karoline.

CHAPTER 1

What’s in a name?

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I didn’t become my parents’ child in the traditional way. Neither one of them was in the delivery room when I was born on 1 August 1980 at Sandton Clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had watched me take my first breath or cut the gristly cord attaching my umbilicus to the womb from which I had been expelled. They didn’t even give me my first name. Karoline.

Instead, the people I call Mum and Dad became my parents by way of a couple of signatures scrawled on a piece of paper, rubber-stamping my status as their child. Literally, a rubber stamp, administered by a clerk at Reigate County Court in Surrey, England, on 20 January 1981. That was nearly six months after I had been born and four months since they had collected me from the adoption agency in London, where moments before, a woman – my biological mother – and her husband, the man whose name appeared on my birth certificate, had given me away. At just seven and a half weeks old, they had left me in the arms of strangers and walked away. Because of the colour of my skin.

I was supposed to have been called Emma, after the protagonist in the Jane Austen novel. In the years prior to my ill-fated conception, way before I was born with a large, black question mark over my head and long before I was signed by a magistrate into my adoptive parents lives, that was the name that had been picked out for me by my adoptive father, Malcolm. He had been reading the book while on honeymoon with my adoptive mother, Angela, and had been taken with the name. A smart and opinionated man, he likely had it in mind to raise a similarly intelligent, forthright daughter and was no doubt inspired by Austen’s leading lady, despite her being described by Austen herself as a character she suspected ‘no one would much like’. As it was, the book, which had served as inspiration for the name of the daughter they did not yet have, was left on the beach one day and had been urinated on by a dog. By the time of my birth and adoption some nine years later, my parents had long given up hope of having a daughter and so had bequeathed the name instead to one of their pet goats. So it was that I, when I came to live with them at age seven and a half weeks, came to be known as Sarah. Sarah Jane, perhaps in honour of Austen herself. I disliked the name for years. Incredibly plain, I often thought. Didn’t suit me. It was nowhere near unique enough, glamorous enough, exotic enough, me enough. I felt I should have been a Perdita or a Zara, or at the very least a Jennifer. A name, perhaps, that was hard to spell. But my parents were not frivolous people, so it was unlikely I would ever have been bestowed anything quite as colourful.

On my first day of school I was devastated to discover there were at least three other girls in my class with the same name. By the time I was seven that number grew to about five, and once I had graduated to middle school I was completely insignificant, lost in a sea of Sarahs. So terribly common. The female Johns and Jameses, ordinary, beige and unexceptional. I already knew I was different, so it seemed ridiculous to try to blend into a collective. And so, in what would become my first modification of self, and without consultation, I cast off that which was keeping me in bondage, stuck fast to the unremarkable. Overnight, when I was about 11 years old, I became Sara-Jayne, so that now I stood out on the school register. Standing out was important. Ironically, later in life, I would grapple tirelessly with a desperate need to fit in.

Of course, this initial alteration offered one of my earliest opportunities to learn that making extrinsic modifications to myself in no way altered what it was that I felt on the inside. Unfortunately, I was a slow learner.

As it was, I also hated the name Karoline. It didn’t fit either, but I knew it was – or at least had once been – a part of me, had belonged to me. They had called me Karoline, the biological mother and the man who had believed he was my father. Karoline. With a K. A name that ironically meant ‘joy’. There were already lots of K names in their family and they obviously wanted to continue what they thought was a trend. I sometimes questioned why they’d even bothered to give me a name at all. They had killed me off so early in the tragedy that they would have been forgiven for simply calling me ‘baby’. ‘The part of the unwanted bastard child was played by ‘baby’.’

At various points, during a difficult adolescence when being Sara-Jayne became too much, I considered simply swapping one name for the other. I was still naïve enough to believe that a straightforward substitution would eradicate the feelings of insecurity, discontent and apartheid that plagued me so often. I saw Karoline as my backup plan and felt that I had the right to take the name back. Mercifully, common sense prevailed and Sara-Jayne weathered the storm.

Even before my troublesome teenage years, though, there were signs that I was having difficulty understanding when and where Karoline stopped and Sara-Jayne started. In primary school a friend once asked what my middle name was. ‘Jane,’ I told her, then went on to rattle off the full name I was given at birth, plus the first, middle and maiden names of my biological mother. ‘Ask Sarah what her middle name is!’ my friends would prod each other excitedly, and I would perform my party trick of the thousand monikers. I liked being the centre of my friends’ attention, but at the same time felt uncomfortable that what secured their interest in the first place was something about me that was strange, different, separate, weird, curious and odd. Everyone I knew – except for my older brother, Adam (my parents’ first adopted child) – had the name their mummies and daddies had given them when they were born. Their names hadn’t changed and neither had their parents. Both of mine had and I never really lost the sense that they could again.

Over the years, as my life as Sara-Jayne began to meander along its own path, something happened that I had not counted on. I found myself being drawn back to Karoline. Ultimately, I allowed her to be reborn and then to be laid to rest with a dignity she had not been afforded by them. What I can say is that after all that has happened, Karoline has now gone, which is strange because in one sense Karoline is me, in another I am Karoline, and my story is about both of us. What happened to her and why, and what happened to me and how?

CHAPTER 2

An immoral act

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Even before I was born, I was a problem child. A problem unborn child, but a problem nevertheless. When I made my entrance into the world by way of the surgeon’s knife, eight days earlier than expected at the Sandton Clinic in Johannesburg on 1 August 1980, one of history’s most abhorrent political ideologies was firmly in place in South Africa. It was also one that would ensure the first few weeks of my life would be nothing less than ‘problematic’.

Although it existed for years as a social movement, apartheid was officially introduced into law in South Africa by DF Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party – the ‘Reunited National Party’ – on his party’s victory in the 1948 whites-only general election. From that moment until its theoretical end in 1994, the government introduced legislation to reinforce its desire to create a racially divided South Africa.

In 1950, two key pieces of legislation – the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act – were passed, requiring strict classification of all South Africans according to racial group. This classification would determine where people, people who weren’t white, could live and work. And who they could get in to bed with. People were classified as either White, Indian, Coloured or Black (‘Native’), often on the basis of spurious criteria. In South Africa the term ‘coloured’ is used to describe someone with mixed ancestry, with origins in southern Africa and other parts of the world, including India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Europe. They are the descendants of slaves and slave owners, the colonisers and the colonised.

Such was the significance of racial classifications under apartheid that a designated office was set up to monitor the classification process. Where a person’s race wasn’t immediately obvious, or if someone wished to be reclassified (usually from coloured to white), certain tests were carried out to determine which group people should be assigned to. These tests were based on public perception of the individual and by their appearance: skin colour, facial features and, infamously, hair. The now notorious ‘pencil test’ decreed that if an individual could hold a pencil in their hair when they shook their head, they could not be classified as white. Such was the absurdity of these tests that often members of the same family would be separated into different racial groups, resulting in divided families, forced apart by the government’s nonsensical policies.

Later, the National Party government enacted further laws that would segregate and control all areas of life, from political rights, voting, freedom of movement, property ownership, leisure, education, medical care, transport, social security, taxation and, of course, sex.

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (prohibiting marriages between ‘Europeans’ and ‘non-Europeans’) was among the first pieces of apartheid legislation to be passed following the National Party’s rise to power and, together with the pre-existing Immorality Act, sought to further enforce the idea of a ‘separate’ South Africa. The word apartheid literally translates from Afrikaans as ‘the state of being apart’, or ‘apart-ness’.

Apartheid proper had been established in law for just over three decades by the time my biological parents committed their illegal, ‘immoral’ sin and I, as the result of their misdeed, had been born a crime of the very worst kind. An indiscretion of Shakespearean proportions – ‘Now very now a black ram. Is tupping your white ewe.’ Theirs was a union that not only terrified proponents of apartheid, but one that was enshrined in the statute books as a transgression so dark and foul that it carried with it, in law, a penalty of incarceration, but in actuality, a punishment often far worse.

While over time I came to understand what had happened to Karoline, learning in very basic terms what apartheid was and how my conception was deemed a criminal act, it wasn’t until I saw in black and white how vehemently the apartheid government sought to prevent the types of union from which I was born that I understood the significance and gravity of what I represented.

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

Reviews for Killing Karoline

[Hanlie van Onselen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a touching story. Thank you for sharing. This is one of those stories that is going to stay with me forever.