Skin

Pinnacle Films

R4 DVD

While watching this film I was struck by the similarity between Sandra in the film and Constance in Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, written in the 1930s. Both girls are victims of racial discrimination, both experience childhoods in which their racial origins are hidden, and both are ill-prepared for the tragedy that life will bring them. In Capricornia, Constance’s father tries to give her some dignity in the white community by starting the fiction that she is the daughter of a Balinese princess, but soon enough the truth becomes known.

Skin is set in the South Africa of apartheid and irrational bigoted racism. Sandra is a “throwback”, a child who looks black because of the black genes in her makeup courtesy of some ancestor getting too friendly with the native women. Her parents are both white so she is automatically classified as White too, but as she enters her teens the truth of her racial origin becomes more evident. So does the prejudice of the white people around her. Sandra’s father, a stubborn racist himself, defends his daughter and tries to keep her “white” classification as best he can. His motive is to convince himself that she is really white and there are no black genes in his ancestry – in such a racist country it is a matter of pride that his family should be all-white. Sandra’s mother is a little more tolerant out of love for her daughter but even she has a racist streak. Unlike Constance Sandra has no other options – she is black.

Sandra must finally face her own decision as to which lifestyle she is going to accept. Even then fate has more in store for her, little of it good. There were a number of Sandras in the 1950s, born into a black world that discriminated against them as whites and a white world that believed blacks had no rights and treated them with contempt. Some of the bigotry as shown in the film would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic for those involved at the time.

As South Africa matured and moved away from apartheid the restrictions on black people were removed. For Sandra, though, it was simply too late.

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