I'm curious to know about your high school years especially — but maybe if you could also tell where you're born and how you grew up.
OK, well, I'll go first because mine's quick. I was brought up on a farm. My parents owned a farm — I still do — near Cape Town, apple-growing area. I went to a government primary school, and then in Grade 7 (so I was about 12), I went to a private school. There were black people at the school — but on a ratio basis. Like they were only allowed, I think it was like 20% of the pupils.
So it wasn't a completely segregated school then?
No, it was private. They got government subsidy. But because we paid much higher fees — because basically the parents supported the school — it was kind of a way to get around apartheid. You see, the reason why the black/white thing in a private school like that wouldn't make a big difference is — remember, it's an expensive school. So your black person — remember the economic thing — your black person is at that school...
Well, that's what I was going to get. The black people that were at our school were — we used to call them "government puppets." The homeland leaders, their kids. So yeah, it wasn't really a true face of —
So yeah, that's the school I went to. Very privileged. We had all sorts of subjects — we could do drama and arts and cooking, a wide variety of sports, we went out to theatres. My whole childhood I hadn't really socialised with black people. The people that we knew — we were on a farm — they worked for us. They were picking apples.
The people who were working with you — the non-white people who were working with you — they had kids that came along, and you...
Yeah, I used to play with them. But it was very much like, "I'm the boss's daughter, and you are —" — you know, like that kind of, I mean, they all used to look up to me and just think I was wonderful. I was like the leader of the gang.
So there's even a hierarchy there?
Oh, definitely. Every time I went to ride my horse, they'd all come and stand there — all in Afrikaans — "Can we ride? Can we ride? Will you take us for a ride?" And I — with like this real wheel thing — where today you can ride, but you know, someday I'll just say, "well, no, today you can't ride." Yeah, like a real madam. Yeah.
So in your private high school, you didn't really have a teaching of ideology or teaching segregation or anything?
No. They didn't used to do it. But in our history books, what they taught us all turned out to be a lie really. A lot of the history as we learned it — it never happened like that.
For example?
This Battle of Blood River — where thousands of black people were slaughtered, and it overturned, and now it ends up it never happened like that.
Oh, no — see, I've heard that, but I didn't realise it wasn't true.
Yeah, this is what we've heard recently. When Tracy was studying historicity, that's when they told them. And it comes out as fact. "This is fact. This is how it happened, and this is why we're all so great" — et cetera, et cetera. And none of that happened.
In Standard 5, I was at a public school — a normal public school, a so-called coloured public school. At that stage, not even black people would come to a so-called coloured school. In Standard 5 I had this very progressive — I suppose he was a big activist — the principal was. And he taught me history.
He was taking some pretty big chances then.
I suppose he was.
High school was great. There were private schools, and I knew people who went to private schools, like Tracy did. But they were boring to us. They had a lot of rules — your hair had to be cut in this way, and you couldn't wear this, and you couldn't wear that. We were having a party at school.
How did you find out about the boycotts and how did they get organised?
Well, you'd have an SRC — Students' Representative Council — and all the SRCs from the different schools would meet. Some or other event would happen in South Africa — and how would you find out about it? Newspapers and stuff like this.
Your question was, what was it like in school? For 90% of the time, school was school. You went there and you learnt and you had a great time with your friends. And that was school for 90% of the time, even more. And then it had the other side to it — the politically aware and active side.
If I'd gone to a government white school, I would have been far more privileged than his school — because we still would have had microscopes in our science lab, and our books were free, and our uniforms. Whereas they actually had to pay for their books, even though, I mean, at coloured schools, a lot of them didn't have enough money to pay for the books — and they still had to pay. And we got all ours free.
Maybe I should clarify what I'm saying. When I say school was school and you went there and it was fun and friends and everything, that's fine — because you're living in this microcosm. You don't see the big picture. And that's the whole beauty of how they engineered this whole thing of apartheid. You don't know what you're missing. You don't know — so you're pretty happy.
By and large, you're aware that this is not right. But by and large, you're still pretty happy. Because of this whole separation — because of this false sense of, "this is how we are, and I look at you and you look at me, but we're all in the same boat. But we just look at each other. You don't really look at the other side."
Give me some more examples of how this social engineering would manifest itself.
Well, you never went to cinemas — buses were completely separate. Either all white or all black. Never mixed. I could go to town and do my shopping and go to the movies and do anything one would do in town, and never come across a black person — except for the cleaner. See them, yeah, but not too close by. Not on the same social level.
My years at varsity spanned pre-apartheid and post-apartheid times. In my first year, I can't count one friend, one white friend. People I'd say hello to, yes — in my class. But not one white friend. On both sides. This was when apartheid was still in force.
There was also a very strong National Party Youth thing at varsity — they were really strong. The Moderate Students Organisation. They were directly linked to the National Party government.
I'll tell you what happened after the first year. After my first year I went overseas — that's when people said, "Why are you coming back to South Africa?" In my first year, whatever was going on in my mind, I never took notice of, and I can't really reflect on that. But I can tell you, when I came back to varsity after I took that year off, there was this whole liberation thing in my mind. There was a weight off my shoulders. I walked around and I had friends, and I'd scream to somebody across the room, and I felt at home at university all of a sudden. I was a part of this thing.
My first year was '89 — still apartheid time, still a lot of police rights and that. And actually having friends being taken to jail. One guy was actually killed, and things like that — that really hit home. Because now suddenly I'm not sitting outside this whole thing looking on, not even looking on — not even knowing about it. I'm actually completely part of this — and actually having people I know being tortured and taken to jail and having their houses raided. And that really hit home to me quite a lot.
I was in res for my first term. You sit in res — and it was overlooking Grahamstown, the township was built on the hill. And you see at night, the spotlights are on to such an extent that it was daytime, literally, in the township. And you hear the gunfire going off all the time. And you just sit there thinking — and you know that some of your friends are living there. And you're wondering: what's going on?
The comments I used to get from other white people — like, I had — used to call my car "the people's car" — because everyone just used to use this car to go to rallies. I used to drive around the township and pick people up. And just the comments from other white students or whatever was just, "Aren't you scared? Why are you going in there?" To me at that stage, it was like — "scared, scared of what?"
That was varsity. Complete change in varsity.
Now I'm thinking about it now — and there's an important thing. No matter where you are in the world, a teenager is still a teenager. When I look at my high school days, I was a full-on teenager. It didn't matter that I was in apartheid South Africa — I was a teenager. My main purpose in life then was being a teenager and having fun and being with my friends. Teenagers are teenagers. I think that's something — you look at Bosnia and you look at whatever — there are teenagers there.
But don't you think it's to the degree of —
Yeah. There must be a lot of black teenagers who are now our age who will look at you and say, "Well, that's not what I went through. My teenage years — my mother was shot and my brother was taken into jail."
A very interesting study would be the coloured people in South Africa through this thing. They were thrown in the middle. Right? And by and large, what it created was — they weren't black, they weren't white — but everybody aspired to be white. Which means nobody sympathises with blacks. You'd sympathise in your mind. But you really wanted to be like that.
Yesterday in the bar — most of those people in the bar were coloured people, and you wouldn't find the mixing with those same white people and African black people. You wouldn't find it — because they were coloured and they were more socially acceptable. I'm accepted because I'm coloured, but not black. It's such a fine line, but it makes such a big distinction.
By and large, coloureds were complete sellouts. They didn't mean much to the struggle, really not. Many of them voted for this Labour Party thing — "Look, I'm OK. I don't quite have it all. But at least I'm not there. So let me rather just shut up and remain who I am."
That happens in the Cape too, right, where a lot of people —
Cape Town. Cape Town voted National Party. That just proves exactly what I'm trying to say. The Western Cape — major, major coloured population. Here we are in today's day and age — the ANC is unbanned, Nelson Mandela's our president — and the Western Cape voted the National Party. They're the ruling party in that province. Coloureds are very, very conservative.
No, it's fine — that's actually pretty good for what I was looking for. I think it gives a good balance.
- Battle of Blood River (1838) — Voortrekker myth; the "thousands of black people slaughtered" version Tracy describes was the standard apartheid-era school history, since extensively revised
- Tricameral Parliament — the 1984 South African constitutional reform that established separate parliamentary chambers for whites, coloureds, and Indians (and excluded blacks); widely boycotted as a "dummy vote"
- Sharpeville (21 March 1960) and Langa massacre — pivotal events in anti-apartheid history
- June 16, 1976 (Soweto uprising) — commemorated annually as Youth Day
- Matthew Goniwe (1947–1985) — Eastern Cape activist murdered by apartheid security forces; "the Cradock Four" case
- Steve Biko (1946–1977) — Black Consciousness leader, murdered in police custody
- D. F. Malan (1874–1959) and Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) — successive National Party prime ministers and architects of apartheid (rendered as "Melans and the Farses" / "Wurt" by Whisper)
- Khoisan — the indigenous southern African peoples whose dispossession Lauren's primary school principal taught
- COSATU — Congress of South African Trade Unions, the dominant trade union federation
- SASCO — South African Students Congress, the black students organisation
- Moderate Students Organisation — National Party–aligned student body
- Rhodes University — Grahamstown university where both Tracy and Lauren studied
- Eastern Cape — historically one of the most active anti-apartheid provinces; Tracy and Lauren are correct that Mandela (Transkei) and Biko (Ginsberg, near King William's Town) both came from this region
- Alice — town in the former Ciskei homeland; home to the University of Fort Hare where many ANC leaders studied
- "I was the leader of the gang" (Section 2) — Tracy on being the "boss's daughter" with the farm workers' children, and being treated as madam at age 8 or 9 when deciding who could ride her horse. The smallest possible moment that captures how apartheid was inherited rather than learned. Pairs editorially with Sonwabo's "I used to swim in the pools of white people" (Interview 03, Section 2) — the same moment from opposite sides of the racial line, both told in retrospect, both unsentimental.
- The Battle of Blood River as official lie (Section 3) — "None of that happened. But it comes out as fact: 'This is fact, this is how it happened, this is why we're all so great.'" The mechanism of false historical narrative in school curricula, recognised in retrospect. Directly applicable to the studio's 2026 work on disinformation — the same technique of curated historical myth-making is exactly what authoritarian and populist movements use now, only on different platforms.
- The progressive principal in Lauren's coloured public school (Section 4) — teaching the Khoisan dispossession to students who had no framework for it. "It took years to digest and fully understand." The bravery and the slow effectiveness of a single teacher doing real history while colleagues taught the lies. A specific candidate for a short-form piece on what real teaching looked like under apartheid.
- Lauren's "social engineering" thesis (Sections 7 and 14) — "How else could you sustain apartheid for such a long time? Not with laws. Not with rules. You can't keep down so many people if you're one to ten." The most articulate analytical passage in any of the South African interviews so far, and directly applicable to the studio's 2026 work — what authoritarian disinformation movements in CEE are doing is also a form of social engineering, working not through laws but through the manipulation of what people experience as their everyday reality. Lauren's analysis from 1995–98 is a frame the studio can use in 2026.
- "The coloured person as buffer" (Section 16) — Lauren's account of how the coloured community was structurally placed between black and white, and how that placement produced the conservative Western Cape voting patterns that persist into the post-1994 era. Editorially extraordinary as a self-critical analysis from inside the community being analysed. Pairs editorially with Sonwabo's account of how the black community treats the coloured community in Colesburg (Interview 03, Section 13) — same hierarchical structure, different angles, same self-aware narration.
- The Western Cape voting National Party in 1994 (Section 18) — the paradox that the ANC's victory was not universal across the country, that the formerly oppressed coloured population in the Western Cape voted for the party of apartheid's last government, and that this was predictable given the social engineering Lauren describes. The 2026 studio's argument about audience targeting for counter-disinformation work has a precise antecedent here: vulnerable populations vote for the people who oppressed them when the social engineering has placed them in a position of relative status above another group they fear losing ground to. Apartheid's coloured population, Hungarian voters in Orbán's rural strongholds, US voters in deindustrialised regions — same psychological structure.
- "Teenagers are teenagers" (Section 15) — Lauren's defence of normal adolescence inside an abnormal system, immediately challenged by her own acknowledgement that other teenagers had mothers shot and brothers in jail. The moral honesty of a person aware of her own privilege within oppression. Pairs with Sonwabo's account of township teenage life (Interview 03) — different positions on the same question of what counts as "normal" childhood under apartheid.