Colour on My Wings

Shelley Wood Gauld

My story spans over five decades—from 1953, the year of my birth, to 2006. It begins at a stone house on a hill at Campania—a Zulu trading-post in KwaZulu-Natal—and culminates in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, in the United States.

As a South African teacher and artist, my aim has been to educate and paint pictures with words; to seize a myriad of time’s treasures before they fragment and fade into the silent abyss of the unrecorded past; to capture something of the distinctive histories and characteristics of fellow South Africans; to convey what it means to live as an immigrant in a foreign country; and to share something of my soul’s spiritual journey. This memoir is far more than a nostalgic flutter down Memory Lane...

The original title of this work was Much Bigger than Grownups: Chronicles of a Native South African and it was intended primarily as a family history. Although the overall perspective in Colour on My Wings, remains the same, it is intended for a more general readership and thus features fewer familial details.

Why the title Colour on My Wings: Chronicles of a Native South African? I was once taught that if a butterfly does not struggle to emerge from its cocoon—if you ‘help it out’ by cutting open its cocoon—it will have no colour on its wings... In the same way, is it not true to say that the colours on our ‘wings’ become increasingly vivid as we struggle through times of hardship and transition?

On my eventual return to South Africa, after residing in the United States for over seventeen years, I became acutely aware of the richness of the colours and the brilliance of the patterns on the ‘wings’ of fellow-South Africans. Even on a national level, I could see that life’s trials had produce a distinctive strength, wisdom and grace in our people. This cultural beauty I have come to attribute largely to the national struggle to emerge from the restrictive cocoons of the past, before being able to take flight... The current generation of South Africa’s youth, with no direct experience of the acute tensions of the Apartheid era, are refreshingly positive and, thankfully, increasingly aware only of the colour on their own, and each other’s, wings.

Each chapter paints a picture of a place in which I have resided or worked for an extended period of time and all ten relate specifically to the stipulated time-frames—because major changes have radically altered the social, economic and political landscape of South Africa in recent decades.  

In the interests of continuity, general information that is ‘bigger’ than my personal story has been placed in grey bhansela (bonus) boxes and, at the end of the book, a section entitled Chapter Notes takes the place of footnotes. These chapter notes are followe...