Caste in Half – Susan Robinson

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.