It is difficult to know exactly where my journey as a birth attendant begins…
MY MOTHER
SWITZERLAND
I was born in Switzerland to a mixed-race couple: Carol, my mother, a Cape Coloured woman from South Africa, and Justin, my father, an Irishman. Their relationship had begun quietly in South Africa during Apartheid, where interracial relationships were still illegal under the Immorality Act. My mother later applied for refugee status in Switzerland, where my sister Kate and I were born.
Both my parents influenced the way I came to understand birth, each carrying a relaxed and deeply embodied relationship with it. My mother herself had been born at home in Athlone, Cape Town, in 1950, attended by a local midwife who travelled by bicycle, as many midwives serving women of colour did during that time in South Africa.
My father too was born at home, the son of an Irish midwife and doctor. A farm boy with a strong affinity for animals, he grew up observing horses, dogs, and sheep giving birth naturally around him.
Although I was born in a private hospital in Switzerland, my mother had originally hoped to birth me at home in the communal safe house where she was living. However, the owner of the house refused to allow “that African girl” to squat and birth there. Friends gathered money together for my mother to give birth at a private hospital instead, where she was induced one week before my due date and eventually gave birth to a 5kg baby after 12 hours of labour.
Stories honouring my parents:
Honouring my mother on this day of her birth
My father wasn’t at my birth
RETURNING
We returned to South Africa in 1986, after the Immorality Act had been abolished, to visit as a family. I had grown up with the songs and stories of my mother’s homeland, feeling the heat of them through the ice-cold winters of the snowy Swiss mountains.
My parents later separated and my father returned to the United Kingdom. My mother met my stepfather, and together they purchased Droëland, a protea farm about an hour outside of Ceres.
DROËLAND
It was there that my mother’s healing hands began to fully emerge.
I gained two younger sisters, Gypsy and Jasmin, and grew up amongst the rhythms of farm life, medicinal herbs, birth, illness, death, and storytelling. My mother began attending the births of local farm labourers, caring for the sick and dying, and helping lay the dead to rest. Together, she and my stepfather cultivated medicinal plants and eventually grew indigenous South African herbs for export.
Many of my earliest understandings of birth, healing, and community were shaped quietly there, watching my mother move between people with deep care and practical wisdom.
Birth stories from Droëland:
Gypsy’s birth story
An’Nooi’s birth story
Droëland
(This is the story of the first birth my mother attended on the farm)
Carol Catches Twins
GRANDMOTHERS & ANCESTORS
