Miniart Design

One of a Kind - Jewel - ART - Creations
Contact: 083 783 6906

TikTok · Doreen Ras

Child of Apartheid II
This painting explodes with the chaotic, vivid world I saw as a child born in 1972 under Apartheid. Bright, clashing colours swirl around the painful symbols that shaped my early life — “WHITES ONLY” benches at the bus stop, “BLANKE GEBIED”, “WHITE AREA”, the hated Dompas, police curfews, barbed wire, and the deconstructed old South African flag hanging like a broken promise over everything. A spaza shop pulses with everyday survival, while a central clock ticks relentlessly, echoing the curfew hours and the Dompas era that controlled every movement.
In the upper reaches, a bird cries out — its tears falling like silent rain over the scene. To me, it became a metaphor for the voiceless sorrow that hung in the air: a creature of freedom forced to witness the cages we built for one another, its song stifled by the weight of a divided land. Below it, the inaccessible beaches stretch as a distant, forbidden dream — places where “Klaas and Alie” and so many others were never allowed to dip their toes in the sea, their lives hemmed in by signs and laws that declared them less than human.
As a little girl I stood with my mother at the bus stop and asked the question that still echoes inside me:
“Why can’t the black people sit on the benches?”
I didn’t have the words then, but I felt the wrongness in my bones. The confusion. The shame. The helplessness of being born into a system I never chose, yet was surrounded by. I could feel the pain of it — the deep empathy for those denied basic dignity, who lived their whole lives under the shadow of “WHITES ONLY” while the rest of us moved through the same streets, breathing the same air but in different worlds.
This work is my adult hand trying to paint the confusion, sorrow, anger, and fragile hope I carried as a child. It is memory and protest at the same time. The Lucky Star tins, Coca-Cola signs, and spaza shop colours sit beside prison bars and the crying bird because that’s how it was — the absurd, everyday normalcy of an inhumane system.
I was too young to change anything. Too small to help. But I saw. And I remembered.
Doreen Ras