The black woman - with white parents

Sandra Laing was born black, but to white parents. It would have been strange anywhere - but in apartheid South Africa it was disastrous. Rory Carroll reports from Johannesburg
Long before science learned to meddle with genes, there was Sandra Laing. She entered the world in 1955, a beautiful baby by all accounts, who could be expected to grow up in a close-knit family amid mines of gold and forests of pine. At the first sight of Sandra no one, not the nurse, her mother, father or neighbours would admit the obvious. Nature had played a trick. Abraham and Sannie Laing were white, their parents, grandparents and great grandparents were white, yet their daughter was dark. By a biological quirk, the pigment of an unknown black ancestor had lain dormant for generations and manifested in Sandra. Genetic throwbacks were not unheard of but if there was ever a wrong place and wrong time for this phenomenon, it was apartheid South Africa.

Her life is an extraordinary tale of a search for identity in a system built on race and prejudice, where home, school, job and sex life was demarcated by skin colour. Born to a conservative Afrikaner family, Sandra's fate was to not be what she was supposed to be.

It has a happy ending, of sorts, and one which is scheduled to hit bookshops and cinemas now that Hollywood has caught wind of the story. The first biography is due out this year and a British production company has signed a deal with Miramax to make the film. Sandra Laing is about to become famous. Sitting in the back garden of her new house in Leachville, a maze of recently built estates fringing farmland east of Johannesburg, the bulky woman with the crew cut does not much resemble the svelte, toffee-coloured youngster who was photographed hugging a tall, white woman three decades ago. The psychological toll of her traumas has been immense, say friends, and Sandra, 47, is taciturn, the eye contact fleeting, the voice low. "I'm much happier with black people. I am, I was, very shy with white people. Even today I still think white people don't like black people because of the way they treated me." A mild way of putting things from someone who was expelled from school, mocked, abused, persecuted and told she was inferior, something less than fully human, because she lacked the pinkness expected of an Afrikaner descended from Dutch settlers. The nose and lips could be European but the skin is evidence of a liaison between a settler and native, perhaps as early as the 18th century.

"Sometimes I wonder how things might have been, what life might have been like, if I was born white. Mostly I try just to forget the past." She speaks slowly, concentrating on each question, but it is clear she would rather play with the grandson resting on her knee, throw a ball to the dog, re-arrange shelves in the grocery shop, do anything other than an interview. Earlier she did smile, when 10 children with violins trooped into her shop, a converted front room of her house, and gave a concert to celebrate the new home and business which, it is hoped, will harbour a normal, stable life. Wellwishers and dignitaries of all colours made speeches to honour what they called a survivor, a symbol of triumph over despair. A performance by Zulu dancers drove the dog wild and Sandra even joined in the laughter.

The wheel has turned full circle. Growing up in the rural town of Piet Retief, Sandra's parents, members of the racist Nationalist Party, also ran a grocery shop, and in the early years she was happy. Treated as white by her parents and two brothers, Adriaan and Leon, she attended the Dutch Reformed Church and was reared as a God-fearing Afrikaner superior to blacks and "coloureds", those of mixed race. "My parents were good people and they loved me very much." The tight black curly hair and ever-darkening skin was noticeable to all and Sandra remembers being told by her mother to avoid the sun. Teachers looked away when classmates called her a "kaffir" and one day, after five years at the Deborah Retief boarding school, the principal told her to pack her bag; she was being expelled. Two policemen escorted the 10-year-old home.

Sandra's father wept and tried to explain to her about the laws which said she would have to attend a school for black or coloured children. Taking their cue from the state, the community punished the family: ignored at church, refused ice cream at shops, rejected by nine schools, cursed. Abraham Laing appealed in vain against Sandra's reclassification as coloured and she ended up in a boarding school 900km from home, lonely, a bedwetter. In 1967 she was reclassified white when the law changed to say the child of two white parents could not belong to another racial group. Blood tests proved she was the biological offspring of Abraham and Sannie.

By now Sandra felt more at ease with non-whites and at the age of 16 she eloped with a Zulu-speaking vegetable-seller, Petrus Zwane. "My father was furious because I married a black man. He threatened to shoot first me then himself if I ever put my foot over his threshold again." It was a step into another world, from ruling caste privilege to the oppression and poverty of townships. From apartheid there was no escape: Sandra would not be allowed to keep her two children unless she was reclassified coloured, as they were, but her father refused his consent, and without documents she had to eke out a living with odd jobs.

Evicted from their town to make way for whites, Petrus turned drunk and violent and Sandra, destitute, placed the children with social welfare, the hardest decision of her life, she says. As apartheid entered crisis in the 1980s Sandra tried in vain to contact her family, only to learn Abraham had died and Sannie did not want to see her. Sandra found a second husband, Johannes Motloung, and had another three children after being reunited with her first two. Three years ago the Johannesburg Sunday Times found her in a township on the East Rand and arranged a tearful reunion at a nursing home with her mother. Months short of her death, Sannie was bubbly and alert: "Now tell me again, about the children." Sandra's brothers, said to be right-wing, still shun contact.

The publicity galvanised a campaign to find Sandra a house of her own, culminating in last month's ceremony in Leachfield, and the story is on its way to a wider audience. Judy Stone, a contributing editor of Oprah magazine, expects to publish a biography next year and Anthony Fabian, a British producer and director, has a $5m (£3.12m) contract with Miramax to make the film. Billed as a true story of love, betrayal and reconciliation, the working title gets to the point: Skin.

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