The highly praised film Skin - which recalls the sad fate that befell that Laing family in the 1960s - offers South Africans a timely reminder of the cruelties of apartheid in general and of the iniquitous doctrine of racial classification in particular.
Sandra Laing was born to a conservative, apartheid and National Party supporting family in Piet Retief near South Africa's border with Swaziland. Instead of enjoying life as a young girl, she suffered the torments of rejection. Instead of bringing joy to her parents, she brought them anguish and shame through no fault of her own.
Unlike her parents, Sandra was dark-skinned and her hair crinkly instead of straight or wavy, probably because one or both of her parents had inherited Negroid as well as Caucasoid genes from one of their forebears. Sandra was mocked and ostracised at the local white school and, according to one account, eventually escorted out of the school by two policemen as if she was a common criminal.
Given her rejection by white children of her age, most of her childhood friends were black and later, when she was 15, she fled to Swaziland with a young black man. Had she lived in a British colony in an earlier age, she would have been said to "have gone native."
At the time of Sandra's birth in 1955, the ruling National Party was pressing ahead with its drive to classify all South African into one of four major racial categories: white, coloured, Asian and black. Race classification was hierarchical, with the opportunities accorded to white being substantially greater those which filtered down to blacks. Coloured and Indian occupied an intermediate position.
Infused with the ideological of apartheid, the National Party government of D F Malan sought to hermetically seal the designated races off from one another. It was an absurd as well as a cruel project. Viewed in context of the Immorality Act, which criminalised inter-racial sexual intercourse and international marriages, it is reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany.