Introduction
Just thirteen years before in 1948, the Nationalist Party had swept to power bringing with it agenda of extreme racial intolerance and prejudice. It has swiftly passed laws designed to halt what it saw as a dangerous blurring of the distinctions it passionately believed existed between people of different races – and for race read ‘skin-colour’. Young Sandra and her family were soon to become casualties of those laws. At a time when DNA testing was not available, the first assumption most people leapt to on seeing Sandra was that she was the ‘shameful’ result of an affair between her mother and black person. ‘A product’, thanks to the new Apartheid racial laws, which had no right growing up among white people.
These images of the Laings together mark moments of calm before a storm of controversy broke over the family – ultimately splitting it up irrevocably.