Overview

Nadia Kamies has written a profound and moving meditation on what it meant to grow up ‘coloured’ in South Africa under apartheid. The photographs from family albums that gave rise to this project not only represent the aspirations of the families and community about whom Kamies is writing, but are also repositories of memories weighted equally with joy and sorrow. Kamies mines these images for their secrets, showing them to be a record of the past and a promise of what the future might be. 

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Reviews

An evocative portrait of the paradoxes of family photographs, deeply private yet radiating outward, seemingly ephemeral yet also permanent, embodying the past yet aimed at the future.  In her moving reading of family photographs, Nadia Kamies finds complex layers of resistance, desire and self-making, but also of absences, uncertainties and unspoken matters. Rare, fading and treasured, the prints are evocative yet paradoxical, recalling discomforting memories of skin colour and hair texture that determined who mattered, who passed and who fit in. Tracing the postures, clothing and expressions of the people in the images, Kamies honours their defiant ordinariness and invoking of a world in which they could belong.   Prof. Gabeba Baderoon, Associate Professor – Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, USA  Among her honours are the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, an Extraordinary Professorship of English at Stellenbosch University, and fellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Nordic Africa Institute, Bellagio and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. Baderoon is the author of Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid, which received the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Best Non-fiction Monograph Award, and the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy. Her poetry has been recognized with the Daimler award, the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing and a Best Poetry Book Award from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Baderoon also co-edited the award-winning essay collection, Surfacing: on Being Black and Feminist, with Desiree Lewis.  https://africanstudies.la.psu.edu/directory/gxb26/   *  This beautifully written book arrives at a time when issues of race, belonging, and what constitutes our true national identity, seem to feature centrally in a range of public dialogues. Sometimes they appear in ways that threaten to further fragment our fragile democracy. Its arrival could not have been more timeous!   Using her family life story and the photographs that capture significant moments as a canvas, Nadia Kamies explores the complexities of growing up ‘coloured’ in South Africa. In an accessible blend of memoir, political analysis, historiography and creative writing, she explores issues that apply to many others whose life trajectories have followed similar paths, as well as the peculiarities of her own family situation which have shaped their particular way of being in the world. It is a story that can enrich our understanding of who we are as a nation, and of who we can still hope to be.  Dr Bonita Bennett is a Trustee and Research Associate of The District Six Museum. Her background is as an educator and anti-apartheid and human rights activist. From 2008 until 2020 she was the executive director of the District Six Museum, an internationally engaged museum of innovation working with the memories of District Six and other communities affected by forced removals.  *    To Whom It May Concern,  I am writing in strong support of Dr. Nadia Kamies’ book, Off-centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘coloured’ in South Africa. Last year, I had the pleasure of inviting Dr. Kamies to Xavier University of Louisiana to speak to faculty and students about her book. I ordered about 30 copies of the book, which were shipped from South Africa. I wish I had more because students were eager to get a copy. Unfortunately, the book is not easily accessible to us here in the United States. This book is fantastic! It gives a historical account of life in Apartheid Africa as a ‘coloured’ person. Many have read the stories of Apartheid, but not from this perspective. I know that once this book is accessible within the US it will be used in several collegiate courses dealing with identity, decolonization, Apartheid history, and oral history.   Dr. Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir is the Keller Family Endowed Professor of History at Xavier University of Louisiana. She earned her Ph.D. in American History from Louisiana State University with African-American and Latin-American history concentrations. Throughout her academic career, she has focused on the New Sout h period through the Civil Rights Movement, with particular interest in African American activism in Louisiana. Dr. Sinegal-DeCuir teaches courses in African American History, including Slavery and Servitude, U. S. Civil Rights Movement, and Hip Hop and Social Justice. She has worked in the field of public history and has been featured on MSNBC and History News Network, has been quoted in the New York Times and published a New York Times Op-Ed article, as well as interviews by local news and radio media and the podcast titled Sticky Wicked: Louisiana Politics and the Press.   https://www.sinegal-decuir.com/home   *  In Off Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘coloured’ in South Africa, Nadia Kamies strains against the archives. She investigates the notion of ‘colouredness’ in South Africa by thinking through representation and attendant ideas of shame and respectability. She uses the family photograph as a lens through which to view what it meant to live through apartheid and to occupy an intermediate space in terms of race, colour, language, religion, and social and cultural status that still impacts on a sense of belonging in a post-apartheid South Africa, and, in particular, in Cape Town. She writes to understand and convey what it means to be part of this diverse group of South Africans who continue to occupy peripheral spaces in the larger South African landscape. Issues of representation and history are central to her writing and she speculates that the act of dressing up and sitting for photographs was a means of performing resistance to the ways ‘coloured’ people were portrayed through the continuum of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. Questions of self-representation, cultural and social practices, she understands to be deeply political in a contemporary South Africa that still bears the scars of a past where ‘black’ bodies were legislated as being less than human.   This book should be made internationally available. It will resonate with those in other parts of the world who have themselves grown up straining against institutional and entrenched discrimination. It will help others to understand how this experience shapes people. Nadia’s style of narration makes the work widely accessible. Her depth of analysis of lived experiences makes it rich reading.   Prof Wendy Morris is an artist, researcher and writer. She was born in Namibia, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Belgium. Wendy is assistant professor at the University of Leuven and expertise director of Art & Society at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels. She is a member of the artistic research collective Deep Histories Fragile Memories. As an artist and researcher, she is interested in travelling women and geographies of journeying that connect pockets of female contraceptive knowledge from the peaks of the French Pyrenees to Signal Hill, Cape Town, and from the Bay of Luanda, Angola, to the Bay of Bahia, Brazil. Nothing of Importance Occurred. Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape is her current project.  https://www.nothingofimportanceoccurred.org/   *  Nadia Kamies’ book, Off Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up ‘coloured’ in South Africa, tells a powerful and universal story that transcends borders, cultures, and backgrounds. While rooted in South Africa, its themes resonate deeply with audiences worldwide, making it an essential addition to bookstores everywhere. Nadia's book accompanied me when I performed my play Pieces of Me, in Norway and Sweden in 2023. The interest was immediate and the copies flew out of my hands, demonstrating a strong international demand. Readers from diverse backgrounds connected with its message, proving that its impact is not limited to a single region. This book belongs in the hands of readers everywhere.  Bo Petersen is an award-winning South African actor with more than 40 years’ experience on stage, TV and film.  Bo has a deep commitment to nurturing and developing original South African theatre, working with undiscovered talent and well-established actors. She has established a successful supplementary career as a dialogue and drama coach for the feature film and advertising industry, working with among others, Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine, Ryan Reynolds and William Hurt. Bo currently resides in the USA where she continues to write, direct and perform. She has performed her play, Pieces of Me, in Norway, Sweden, the USA and in South Africa.   https://www.bopetersen.biz/   *  Reading Nadia Kamies' ""Off Centre and Out of Focus: Growing up 'coloured' in South Africa"" felt like finding a missing piece of my family puzzle. As someone raised in The Netherlands by South African parents, I've always struggled to understand the values and unspoken rules that shaped our home life.  This book did what years of trying to talk with my mother couldn't—it helped me make sense of her disappointments, and that feeling of never quite belonging anywhere. I also now understand why my father placed such emphasis on our educational and professional achievements. Effectively he wanted us to regain and exceed the status we lost because of our forced exile and becoming invisible people in the Netherland. Kamies puts into words that strange mix of secrecy, shame, and silence that filled our house when I was growing up.  What struck me most was recognising patterns in my own life that I'd never connected to our South African roots before. The book helped me understand why certain traditions and values I've passed down to my children have always puzzled my Dutch friends and family.  For anyone with connections to South Africa's diaspora, especially those of us who feel caught between different worlds, Kamies' story is both comforting and clarifying. She helps us see that our complicated feelings of displacement aren't just personal—they're part of a shared experience that spans generations and continents.  This book deserves to be read by anyone trying to piece together their fragmented cultural identity or understand the lasting impact of South Africa's history on families like mine who ended up scattered across the globe.  Ellen Fischat is a Social Impact Entrepreneur and the Founder of Story Room, a social enterprise that focuses on inclusive, digital and socio-economic impact program design and implementation. She holds an Honour’s Degree in Social Work and Community Development (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). In 2006, after 23 years in Amsterdam, she returned to South Africa, her place of birth, where she has been involved with various community initiatives based on social entrepreneurship principles. She is the Managing Director for The Silicon Cape Initiative and was the Co- Founder and Incubator Manager for Propella Business Incubator, a Public Private Partnership between the Nelson Mandela University Incubator and Engeli Enterprise.  https://2by2.co.za/storyroom/   *  While reading ""Off-Centre and out of Focus: Growing up 'coloured' in South Africa"" by Nadia Kamies, I was instantly caught by the story of the young woman of color living through the apartheid years. It has been more than a year since I read this excellent book but it still comes to mind often.    What really got me, is how this life lived in South Africa could be of interest to those living in any other society with issues of racism where you are unable to meet and get to know your neighbor due to your ethnicity, religion or color of your skin. Today, it feels like we are finding ourselves increasingly polarized, which makes this book of even more importance.   Albeit presenting a well-researched academic work, it was a fascinating read and journey well-guided by the rich representation of personal, authentic photographs. It made the life story close and very moving. Having been born and raised in Sweden, this was a necessary education, and an unromanticized lesson in a life that could have been mine - had I been born in South Africa.   I highly recommend ""Off-Centre and out of Focus""   Anna Rosvall Stuart is the Executive Director of the Sverige-Amerika Stiftelsen/The Sweden-America Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden 

Author Information

Nadia Kamies graduated from the University of Cape Town as an occupational therapist and worked extensively with children before turning her focus to writing. Her work has been published in academic journals as well as in the mainstream media. She is the author of a chapbook published as part of the artistic project, Nothing of Importance Occurred, in collaboration with the LUCA School of Art in Belgium. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in History from the University of Pretoria. Her writing is rooted in the heritage of Cape Town where she was born and continues to live. When she is not writing she may be found in a pottery studio, on a yoga mat or swimming. 

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