Time to end classification

“I WISH we could get to a point in South Africa where we stop categorising people based on the colour of their skin, but rather view everyone as human beings. I’m not black only, I’m not white only. I don’t see myself as coloured. I’m a person.”

From the time she was born up until the age of 10 when she attended boarding school, Catherine Mather was oblivious to the fact that her family was different.

With a black mother and a white father, Mather and her two brothers were raised to believe they need not confine themselves to one particular race.

“When my parents started dating, they were in the old Transkei, Sterkspruit, at the time and they were very much under the radar. But the problem came in when they got married [in 1981].

“It was an issue because they would get letters to say the marriage wasn’t valid.

“In Sterkspruit they didn’t have to hide, but whenever they had to leave town it was a different stor y.

“For instance, when I was born, my dad rushed my mother to the Aliwal North Hospital. He tried to have her booked in because she was in labour, but they stopped my parents at the entrance to say my mother was not allowed at that front entrance and she had to go to the back entrance [but] my father could enter through the front entrance.”

Mather first realised her family was different when she attended boarding school in Queenstown.

“People started pointing me out and children would ask me ‘What are you? What race are you?’ That’s when I started thinking there’s something different about me, but I still couldn’t understand.”

Filling in forms that require details about their race is always a challenge for Mather and her brothers, something she hopes will be phased out.

“I still struggle with Census and filling in forms about what colour I am. I just tell them to put down whatever you think I am,” she said.

“I’ve dated a black guy, coloured guy, Muslim, white . . . When you’re not with someone the same colour as you, people naturally look twice when we walk together. I haven’t had nasty comments, but I have had people who stare at me.”

Although she grew up more westernised, Mather’s mother did not deprive her children of their Xhosa heritage.