The story of an apartheid child

Now for our next book for March we'll be reading When She was White: The True Story of a Family divided by Race by Judith Stone.

Here's a summary of the book:

The Sandra Laing case made international news as an example of South Africa's apartheid at its nuttiest, when, in 1966, the nine-year-old Laing, who was significantly darker than her white-skinned parents, was reclassified as Coloured and expelled from the white school she was attending. At 11, she was classified white again, and at 26, through her own efforts, became Coloured again. Laing had a hard life, especially after she ran away from home at 14 with the first of a succession of married black men.

Although an anti-apartheid poster child outside of South Africa, Laing's memory so often fails her that Stone's book becomes an exercise in recovered memory, coupled with a reliance upon the remote expertise of various "lawyers, historians, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, and some of the South-African journalists who'd covered her story over the years." Stone is at her most successful in eliciting recollections of misery and family strife. She fills in the blanks with "official documents, government records, newspaper archives, and interviews" with Laing's friends, family and other community members. But Laing is, unfortunately, too frail a vessel upon which to hang all this, along with digressive minilectures on genetics, history, anthropology and economics.

We'll be meeting near the Bernal Heights area on Sunday March 22, 2009. After this book club event, there will be a break for the month of April and we'll return to our next event in May.

*Get your book with a 15% discount at BookSmith in the Haight district when you say you're a WOW book club member*

Knowing a Woman's Perspective in the Darfur Conflict

We had an incredible although quite ironic time meeting up at our local teahouse to discuss Halima's story of survival from her childhood in Darfur to her exile in England.

Halima gave us a more insightful look into what Darfur's lifestyle was like before the infamous conflict that we hear about today in the news. Being a member of Zaghawa tribe, we learn about her daily life with her family and the rare encouragement of her father to support her education, recognizing her potential. We can feel the ethnic tensions more predominantly when she goes to school and when she starts getting trained to become a doctor.

Although Halima has us accompany her in the most excruciatingly painful experiences (ie female circumsicion and gang rape), it brings us closer to what has been the experiences of many women from Darfur.

One would have thought that leaving Darfur would have made her life easier and again, Halima gives us another aspect to her story, her immigration story of adjusting to a new country and becoming a new type of minority.