Killing Karoline – Sara-Jayne King

I often contemplate the sins of our fathers and the ruthlessness of a society’s collective consciousness when I read, hear or learn about tragedies suffered by individuals as a direct consequence of segregation and prejudice based on colour, culture or religion. In South Africa we have an abundance of such stories that remain untold.

Reading Sara-Jayne King’s memoire, Killing Karoline, made me cringe and filled me with rage about the injustices and inhumane acts of the apartheid regime that plagued our land for so long and that was condoned by the collective consciousness of my very own society.

Karoline King, as Sara-Jayne was named at birth, was born in 1980 in Johannesburg, South Africa as a result of an affair, illegal under apartheid, between a white British woman and a black South African man. Under the apartheid’s Immorality Act her birth was – as like Trevor Noah described his own birth in his memoire – a crime.

Of course, both parents would have ended up in jail should it have become known that, although the baby was declared white at birth, she started showing signs of a dark skin tone after three weeks.

This is Sara-Jayne’s shocking story of her illegal birth and how the unlawful affair is first covered up (her mother hurriedly getting married to her then fiancé) and the baby taken overseas and given up for adoption. On their return her mother tells the family that the baby had died and a funeral is arranged.

Sara-Jayne – the name her adoptive parents give her grows up in a middle-class home in the south of England with a white mother and father and black brother, also adopted. Although her parents are open and honest from the start about her being adopted, she suffers loneliness and battles to fit in as the only ‘different’ child in her otherwise lily white family and class.

Her earliest memories are of her questioning her identity, her need to find answers to the many mysteries surrounding her birth, and she describes with brutal honesty how her consequent self-loathing and her desperate need to be loved and accepted lead to acts of self-destruction. When her adoptive father (the first man who ever loved her) leaves their family and also distances himself from Sara-Jayne, she turns more and more on herself despite her academic achievements and success in her career.

What depressed me most, though, is the reaction of her biological mother when Sara-Jayne writes to her at age twenty asking her to answer some questions; and who then, once again, rejects her daughter. This rejection and learning that she has a blood brother who she would love to meet, lead to her return to South Africa at age 26 where her demons catch up with her to the extent that she spends more than a year in rehab and counselling.

Back in her country of birth she finds, however, that she once again does not quite fit in – being neither black nor white and not really accepted by her family. She describes facing her birth family for the first time, and having to face her anger and sense of rejection as they try to work through their own feelings about what they have done when they tried to kill off an inconvenient baby.

Her journey is about facing issues of identity, race, rejection and belonging and is a brave and honest memoire that leaves one filled with admiration for this woman and her quest to find herself. Reading the last few pages, I am filled with an intense hope that she will finally find acceptance and peace in her identity.