Coloured Diaries: Experiences of an Eastern Cape 'Mixed-Breed'

In this highly personal essay, the author, Brenda Wardle grapples with the complex and compelling issues of identity and politics and the role they play in shaping consciousness and being. As the offspring, herself of that peculiarly South African creation, the ‘mixed-breed’, Wardle explores what it means to grow up in a world of warped and inverted identities, where the oppressed often do the work of the oppressor, by establishing their own divisions among themselves. Hers is a story of exclusion, alienation and ‘othering’ but ultimately, a story of transcendence and acceptance. This, is an autobiographical interrogation of the meaning of identity through the prism of growing up in Apartheid South Africa.