Q: Could you begin by telling us a bit about your background?

Carolus: Okay, ja, I was born in 1957. Since then I’ve been living in Silvertown. My parents had both grown up in Retreat. Then, just after they were married, their families were forced out; Retreat was declared a white Group Area. The families had to move in all together. I remember, in my childhood, we had my parents, my granny, her sister, my grandpa and four of us, the kids, in this selfsame two-bedroomed house here in Silvertown.

My father was, still is, what is known as a printer's assistant. It's somebody who wipes off the ink and that sort of thing. A semiskilled labourer. My mother used to be a nurse, but she became ill and stopped working when we were very young.

Q: Do you have memories of hard times?

Carolus: Ja. Quite a lot. Ja, I don't want to go into too much detail. The one problematic thing, and where probably I got a lot of my early politicisation, was my father's incredibly overdeveloped sense of justice. He was always standing up for some old toppie, say, whom the bosses had been messing around at work. He’d lose jobs because of standing up. That would mean hard times for all of us. Times when there was very little food in the house.

Q: And the women in your family?

Carolus: My mother is quite a strong person, not in the same vociferously articulate way as my father. More the kind of strength of having to cope with what I now (given a more sophisticated understanding) call the triple oppression of black women – oppressed by capitalism, oppressed by racism, and oppressed by sexism. She’d sit us down and explain what was happening. Always explaining the difficult situations to us – be it the fact that there wasn't food in the house, or explaining my father's feeling depressed.