First published by Daily Maverick 168

Heritage Day is meant to recognise and celebrate the diversity of cultures, beliefs and traditions that make up the tapestry of South Africa. A day for citizens to tell their stories about who they are and where they come from. Sadly, we are so polarised as a South African society, that the one day which was meant to celebrate all that we are, has had to devolve into the lowest common denominator of all that we eat, National Braai Day. 

Twenty-six years after the demise of apartheid, we still see bigoted diatribes about how backward we would be if not for the civilising influence of our colonial masters. 

We are told by some white compatriots that State Capture proves that blacks are incapable of governing.

Companies such as Unilever, which sell products like TRESemmé, still have the tone-deafness to use racially stereotyped marketing on Clicks adverts in a majority black country. 

Anti-white and anti-Indian race-baiting rhetoric is liberally used as weapons of divisive destruction by the likes of Ace Magashule and Julius Malema. 

If we for a moment switch off the ignorance, hate and fearmongers on social media, commercial and political platforms, step out of our cultural comfort zones and siloes, and actually try to learn a bit more about who we are and where we come from, we may start weaving a new narrative about what it means to be South African. 

It has always amazed me how isiZulu speaking friends can recite their paternal clan lineage over two centuries all the way back to uShaka’s Zulu nation- building wars. 

Many of us with mixed ancestry, especially from the Cape, are not as fortunate as our Nguni brothers and sisters and have difficulty tracing our ancestral roots. 

My reading of early 17th century colonial Cape history tells me that my ancestry is most likely a genetic masala from the mingling of the indigenous Khoe-Khoe, San and Xhosa with Malaysian, Bengali, Angolan and Malagasy slaves and Scottish, English, Dutch, and French colonial settlers. 

Two years ago, I embarked on a quest to unravel the mystery of my ancestral past and dragged my 87-year-old father to the Wits Human Origins Centre. 

By taking mouth swabs from my father and me, the mitochondrial DNA heritage tests would tell me the origins of the direct female ancestral lines of both my parents. This would explain only a small part of my genetic make-up, because it would not tell me anything about the genetic origins of these two grandmothers’ fathers nor would it tell me anything about my two grandfathers’ mothers or fathers. But it was a start. 

I was intrigued to find out more about my father’s heritage as his mother passed away when he was seven and we knew very little about that side of the family. I was less intrigued about my mothers’ maternal heritage because I grew up with my beloved Granny Dawsie, my mother’s mom and I knew her story very well. 

Born in 1907, Lily Newman was an early 20th century rebel from Mayfair, in Joburg. She drove around on a scooter, was classified White European, her family descendant from what she described as a renegade from the British army. Lily left her family in Mayfair and eloped to marry a coloured man in Cape Town, my maternal grandfather Willie Dawson. 

Gran swigged whisky, smoked, swore like a trooper, played rummy and kept food on the table by sewing beautiful wedding dresses for Muslim, Jewish and Christian brides in the working class neighbourhood of Salt River in Cape Town. 

She was a tough cookie. When she lived with us in Durban, she stopped a bush-knife wielding gangster from chopping up his terrified girlfriend in front of my eyes. 

After the National Party rose to power in 1948 and started cementing apartheid, gran’s family was split in two. Some of her children were classified European and others coloured. My mother was classified European. This posed a problem because she wanted to marry my father, who was coloured. She was prevented from doing so due to the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which prohibited sexual relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. 

Gran accompanied my parents to the government office to get my mother’s racial classification changed. When the perplexed officials asked her how the rest of her family would feel if she had a daughter who was coloured, Gran simply killed them all off. “It doesn’t matter what they think, they are all dead,” she lied. 

Gran essentially committed race and class suicide to be with us, her family. 

That’s what we thought. The results of our mitochondrial DNA tests make a total mockery of the very notion of race and everything that Anglo-Dutch colonialism and apartheid did to create the structural inequalities that still impoverish the majority of Black South Africans today. 

My father’s mother’s ancestry can be traced to an aboriginal Ainu woman from the Island of Hokkaidu in northern Japan. The Ainu, who Japanese scientists found to be closely related to the Aboriginals of South East Asia, were hunters and fishers. 

The mitochondrial DNA ancestry of my white grandmother was traced to a hunter gatherer woman who lived in Central Africa some 30 000 to 40 000 years ago. 

Granny Dawsie and I share the same founding genetic mother as the Twa people who live in the rainforests of the Congo. My white grandmother was black. 

With my Scottish name and surname, my South East Asian appearance, my Twa and Ainu hunter gatherer founding mothers, my mixed heritage South African existence, I am the living nightmare of miscegenation that Hitler, Verwoerd and their descendants tried to prevent. 

My story also does not fit neatly into Julius Malema’s “Kill all whites because they are all evil” narrative. It is a bit more nuanced with personal choice, a bit more textured with love, a bit more subtle than screaming dichotomies, a bit more difficult to box in the narrow confines of black and white. 

My story and the story of my two grandmothers’ genetic lineage is not unique. 

Evidence provided by studies of human mitochondrial (Mt)DNA genomes prove that ultimately, all of us can trace our ancestry back to one woman from Africa, who geneticists have called mitochondrial Eve. 

We all belong to one race. The human race. Yet we are still torn apart by ridiculous, fallacious, dangerous and life-threatening notions of racial superiority, and inferiority. 

It is the 350-year perpetuation of this racial fallacy that has resulted in South Africa having the highest levels of inequality in the world, where the poorest of the poor are overwhelmingly black and female. And the wealthiest 10%, who are majority white and male, own 70% of the nation’s assets. This is the inhumane story of our heritage. 

And this is the heart of the South African narrative we have to change. DM168