In our own skins

The Cape, 1652: Europe and Africa collide. As the Dutch and, later, the British seep into southern Africa's arid west, they form an uneasy alliance with the indigenous San, Khoi and Griqua people. In the first unions between settlers and indigenous peoples, the Coloured people of the Cape flicker to life. But events thousands of miles away are soon to upset this tenuous balance of power. Slavery and its moral and religious hegemony quickly demonises interracial unions; in the spat between the Dutch and British over the Cape's huge strategic value, the Khoi, San, Griqua and nascent Coloured populations are trampled underfoot. With literal and ideological muzzle-loaders blazing, the British and Afrikaners rampage through two wars that culminate in another type of union in 1910 -- the Union of South Africa -- which sees the Coloured people losing what little parliamentary representation they had under the British. This is the extraordinary story of a small but proud group's 84-year battle to regain the franchise, told through the eyes of an uncompromising insider. From the Stone meetings, conducted from a boulder on a windswept District Six hillside, to a petition carried, torch-like, to faraway London in 1909, it maps a trajectory of loss -- and of restoration. Its rich cast -- among others, the Glasgow-educated Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, his fiery daughter Cissie Gool, the Ghanaian FZS Peregrino, Jimmy and Alex la Guma and Labour Party stalwart Allan Hendrickse -- plays a leading role in pulling the Coloured people through the post-colonial morass that is South Africa up to 1994 and beyond and proudly placing them, fully represented, in the Cabinet of Nelson Mandela -- one of the most iconic leaders the world has ever known.