While the bulk of writings on the apartheid years in South Africa surround the struggle between White and Black populations, not much as been recorded about the races caught in between. 'Colored Hill' essentially focuses the lives of the Colored community caught in the middle, proverbially 'sitting on the fence' and in large part denied allegiance or political affiliation to either the Whites or Blacks.

The story is set in the sixties through the eighties, and focuses the Hunt family living in a newly created Colored township. The young family grapples with their new environment of discrimination and the influences surrounding the new generation posited with the struggle for democracy vis-a-vis tolerance among themselves and within the ranks of their new racial classifications.

Winning the struggle against apartheid, however, continues to reflect 'freedom' through grappling with a demon of another kind: AIDS and HIV, a nemesis that divides the population and inculcates discrimination along other lines.

 

Links to some reviews

Journal of Commonwealth Literature http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/41/4/181.pdf?ck=nck

University of the Western Cape     http://www.uwc.ac.za/arts/grapevine/GV3/colored_hill_by_verenia_keet.htm