From an adult’s point of view, I was destructive and out of control, but as a child I didn’t think of it that way. I never wanted to destroy. I wanted to create.

found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. On our front wall someone had written in Afrikaans, “Heks”—“Witch.”

My mom was the problem child, a tomboy, stubborn, defiant.

I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love me unconditionally in return.”

When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a Biblical name. It’s just a name. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be

, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would exist.

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do.

When you strike a woman, you strike a rock.” As a nation, we recognized the power of women, but in the home they were expected to submit and obey.

five-year-old I didn’t think of Koko as a real person. Since her body didn’t move, she was like a brain with a mouth. Our relationship was nothing but command prompts and replies, like talking to a computer.

Some women used hot cooking oil. Water was if the woman wanted to teach her man a lesson. Oil meant she wanted to end it.

He was trying to live up to this image of what he thought a husband should be, dominant, controlling.

So, true to her nature, she found an option that was not among the ones presented to her: She took a secretarial course, a typing class. At the time, a black woman learning how to

The police would kick down the door, drag the people out, beat them, arrest them. At least that’s what they did to the black person. With the white person it was more like, “Look, I’ll just say you were drunk, but don’t do it again, eh? Cheers

Apartheid was perfect racism. It took centuries to develop, starting all the way back in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company landed at the Cape of Good Hope and established a trading colony, Kaapstad, later known as Cape Town, a rest stop for ships traveling between Europe and India.

She’d head straight out, and as we’d inch our way past the blockades, she’d give the rioters this look. Let me pass. I’m not involved in this shit.

who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother’s head—I’ll take the new car with the warranty every time.

No! They’re going to take you!” For the longest time I thought she meant that the other kids were going to steal me, but she was talking about the police.