From birth Sandra Laing looked different than her parents and siblings, but they treated her the same. That is until she was 10 years old and the South African government stepped in and claimed she was “colored,” a term used during the apartheid.
Her parents, who were both classified as white, fought to reclassify their daughter and though they eventually won, she later became estranged from her family when she eloped and then gave birth to two Black children.
While her father and siblings refused to see her, Sandra was able to reunite with her mother, who initially also refused to reconnect. Decades had passed, but shortly before her death Sandra reunited with her mother, a sweet moment that was caught on camera.
Susanna Magrietha “Sandra” Laing was born in 1955 in Piet Retief, a small conservative town in South Africa during the apartheid. Her white, Afrikaans-speaking parents, Susanna Margaretha “Sannie” and Abraham Laing, also had two boys, Leon and Adriaan.
Sandra’s skin was darker than anyone in her family. Her hair was also curlier, but her parents insisted she was white.
“My father told me I was white. He thought of me as his white little girl,” Sandra said.
While children often don’t pay attention to each other’s differences, Sandra grew up during the apartheid era where institutionalized racial segregation lasted until 1994.
It wasn’t until Sandra started attending boarding school and classmates began teasing her that life became much more difficult for the entire family.
Children called her “Blackie” and “Frizzhead,” and they refused to use the water fountain after she drank from it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
“In 1966, when I was 10, the police came to take me away from my school. Mr Van Tonder, the principal, said I was not white and could not stay. Two policemen drove me to my father’s shop in Panbult,” she said.
“They said I was being expelled because I looked different.”
While nine other schools refused to accept Sandra, her parents fought the government. The state attempted to reclassify her as “colored” or mixed-race despite Sandra’s parents having blood tests that she was their daughter.
Eventually she was considered white, as her father fought to have any child born to white parents classified as white.
However this didn’t signal the end.
Although Sandra was once again considered white, she found that she connected more with people who looked like herself. When she was just a teen, she met Petrus Zwane, a man who had a wife and three children and was 20 years older than her.
The two eloped when she was just 16 years old. They escaped to Swaziland, where Zwane was from, but they were both arrested for illegal entry and jailed.
They eventually returned to South Africa, but Sandra’s family didn’t welcome her. Abraham had already made it clear he did not approve of his daughter’s choices.
He reportedly pulled a gun on Zwane and threatened his life.
“My father was furious because I married a black man,” Sandra said.
Then Sandra became pregnant, and after she gave birth she wanted to introduce her child to her family.
“She said I must bring him, but that I should come in the middle of the day so my father wouldn’t know,” Sandra recalled her mother saying.
Zwane dropped Sandra and their son off, careful not to be seen with the two as Abraham had already threatened him. Sannie got to meet her grandson, but their meeting was over within a few minutes as she worried Abraham would return.
Less than two years later Sandra returned with her newborn daughter, and sadly it would be the last time she would see her mother.
“As I was about to leave, my mother said they were thinking of moving. She said I must look after myself, and also that I should not make contact with her again,” Sandra said. “I was sad, but I knew it was my father’s idea, not hers.”
Since her children were Black, Sandra had to once again fight the government about her race. In order to legally live with her children she had to be reclassified as “colored.”
It took her nine years.
By 1988 her father had died. She never saw him again after he disowned her.
“I felt sad and shocked. I had wanted to ask him for forgiveness before he died,” she said.
Even though her relationship with her father had been nonexistent, Sandra wanted to try and repair the one she had with her mother before it was too late, so with the help of a cousin she contacted Sannie.
She heard back from Sannie, but their conversation ended there. It wasn’t until after the apartheid when Sandra was featured in the Johannesburg Sunday Times and received some help from the newspaper with locating her mother.
Her mother was found to be living in a retirement home in Pretoria, about an hour away from Sandra.
Finally, in January 2000, nearly 30 years after she last saw her mother, Sandra was set to reunite with Sannie.
“I was afraid she was still mad at me,” Sandra said. “But Ma looked up and I saw that she still loved me.”
While her mother, who was 80 at the time, was happy to see her daughter, Sandra’s brothers were still angry with her and blamed her for their family’s problems.
Even though her brothers protested and didn’t want their mother seeing Sandra, she continued to visit her mother until July 2001, one month before Sannie died.
While Sandra was able to reconnect with her mother, her relationship with the rest of her family was still fractured. So when Sannie died, no one informed Sandra until after the funeral.
Sandra is just one of many people who were so negatively impacted by the apartheid in South Africa.
It hurts my heart that her own family disowned her, but I am glad to hear she was able to reunited with her mother before it was too late.
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