MY BLACKNESS IS SUPPOSEDLY visible only because I do not ‘look white’. But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called ‘Coloured’. In the Western and Eastern Cape provinces ‘what I am’, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. In Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of the country, I am asked which tribe and which country I am from. In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live ‘in Africa’. People from different parts of the world ask ‘what mix’ I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White.3 I am not half-and-half.

FAMILY STORIES

The anthropologist Tim Ingold borrows the term ‘meshworks’ from Henri Lefebvre to refer to reticulate lines of journey, not ‘networks’ or lines of ‘getting-there’ that connect points as destinations (Ingold 2007: 81–84, 2012: 206).