Caste in Half

The fog comes towards my mother’s village early in the morning, a floating mass that moves towards the hills

and vanishes in the blue sky. Then we see a beautiful view of the Sigor Valley below, a vast plain of game country that stretches as far as the eyes can see…

After leaving England with a double first from Oxford University, Susan Robinson’s father moved to Kenya to work for the colonial government. Her mother was Pokot, from a small village of grass-thatched houses on the African plains.

As Susan and her siblings grow up in the knowledge that they are half-white, half-black, they struggle to establish their identities in a society that can be ruthlessly cruel to outsiders. Emotionally, intellectually and culturally they are torn between their mother’s and their father’s worlds. This is the story of their survival and their journey to freedom in the rapidly changing world of the 1960s.

Caste in Half is also a hymn to the beauty and majesty of Kenya, conjuring up vivid images of the country’s incredible landscape, flora and fauna. Written with great passion and a profound awareness of a way of life that has now passed into history, it is a memoir that will haunt you for a long time to come.