“Were you tortured by your own thirst
In those pleasures that you seek
That made you Tom the curious
That makes you James the weak?”
Rodriguez (Searching for Sugarman)- Crucify Your Mind

Me:

I was born in Johannesburg, Apartheid South Africa in 1960. My mom was a trainee nurse and she met my dad while he was recovering from an accident in which he had lost a leg. She was 19, him 28 (I think). Before he left the hospital she was pregnant – with me. They tried to build a life together but it didn’t work out. When I was two and a half, he took a car out and put a hosepipe from the exhaust to the window. An aunt tells me she talked him out of taking me with him. It would have saved me much pain if she hadn't - conversely it would have caused others even more pain. Life is so complicated.

My dad's suicide led to me being put into the care system and being moved from pillar to post until shortly before I was 5 when I was adopted by a dysfunctional couple, as a substitute for the children they thought they couldn’t have. By this time, I was a very disturbed little boy and my adoptive father, who was an immigrant from the UK, thought he could beat the disturbance out of me. My mother egged him on – and I learnt to dislike her even more than I hated him...

The more he beat me, the more disturbed I became,
The more disturbed I became, the more he beat me
– how’s that for a vicious circle?

Here are two defining moments that spring out from the time I spent with them. (By the time I was 11 I was mainly back in institutions, and back to moving from pillar to post).

When I was around 8 or 9 I had cause to go to our maid’s room, which was about 15 yards from the adoptive folks' very comfortable and large suburban house outside of Durban. Her room was cramped, and blackened by candle smoke because she didn’t have electricity – it was furnished with cheap furniture and very little of it. I asked my adoptive Mother why our maid lived in such terrible conditions, and she replied:

“They have different needs to us.”

Even at that age I knew that was a blatant lie and thus I learned to question what was going on around me and came to an understanding that none of us should be treated as a lesser being, nor judged, nor subjected to abuse and poverty or even death because of who brought us into this world ………. Perhaps because of my own disturbance I was unable to muster the supremacist ego of the racists around me – and I was further marginalised for not being one of them…… It is one of the greatest tragedies of my life, that my birth brother, from whom I was separated in my toddler-hood, and only found again a quarter of a century later, did become one of them, and still is. I love him so dearly – but our political differences prevent us from enjoying each other.