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 The Space Between Tribes: Faith, Identity & Belonging

I have been called many things in my life, but rarely have I fitted the names comfortably. On the farms of my South African childhood, I belonged without quite belonging — a white boy speaking isiZulu, moving easily where invisible lines were meant to stand. Years later, in the United Kingdom, I discovered that one can cross oceans and still remain an oddity of sorts. This space is not an argument, nor a defence. It is simply a place to reflect on how a life lived between tribes slowly widens into something steadier than either tribe.

In my early years of formation, I was on farms not far from Sharpeville, though as a child I did not yet understand the weight that name would carry in history. The land was my first teacher. Red soil that clung to bare feet. The sweet-sour scent of cattle. Wind pressing through blue gums planted as windbreaks. Men and women who worked the land with us, who spoke to each other in rhythms different from my own home language, and yet whose laughter I understood instinctively.
My parents carried themselves with a quiet honour. We were part of what some have come to call the “White Tribe of Africa,” yet I was raised without the social hostility that so often defined that tribe. Respect was expected. Dignity was assumed. I was allowed to roam — not as an owner, but as a child unafraid. It would take years for me to realise how unusual that posture was in a country braced by racial tension.

As I grew, the country grew louder. Lines hardened. Expectations tightened. There were ways one was meant to think, ways one was meant to speak, ways one was meant to position oneself in the great machinery of South African life. I learned early that I did not quite fit the script. I could see loyalty where others saw a threat. I could see common humanity where others saw hierarchy. That difference did not make me heroic. It simply made me awkward, yet I was spared the harsh edge when my family relocated not long before my tenth birthday, from the geographic epicentre of the ideology’s implementation and rhetoric to Natal Province. 

Military service followed, as it did for many young white men of my generation. At that stage of my life, I did what most boys of my tribe did — I did not question much. What basic training did was drive me into exhaustion, press toughness into my body, and isolate me from all that was familiar. It was not questioning that came to the fore, but surviving and getting through. Failure was not an option or allowed. Survival and getting through were the focus and effort of the whole being. Yet in that pressure, something unexpected happened. It could only have been a moment from childhood, at the age of four, of praying quietly with Elsie, age seven, as she taught me my first simple prayer, and a closeness stirred that I could only describe as the presence of God. It took me completely by surprise after all those years had passed. In reflection, that intense knowledge of God, with me, guarded and subsequently protected me on each annual military service call-up.
 
Over the following three years, through encounters with other young adults and through patient unfolding, I experienced a powerful encounter with Christ and the meaning of Redemption. That encounter set me on the trajectory of Christian witness that would guide and reshape my life in ways I could not have imagined then.

Working life brought its own education. Commerce and Industry are rarely neutral. It reveals assumptions about worth, power, and voice. I met remarkable people across cultural lines — some wounded, some hopeful, all navigating a country in transition. South Africa was changing; so was I.
When Christ becomes a conviction, infiltrating the whole of life, something steadier takes root. I began to see that belonging anchored in race or nation will always feel fragile. Even the most familiar soil can shift. But belonging grounded in grace — that is different. That widens rather than narrows. So wide is grace that unexpected paths lead to doors of service I would never have entered through before.
Years later, what was meant to be five years of ministry in the United Kingdom became something longer, deeper, and more unsettling than expected. I arrived carrying Africa in my accent, my humour, my posture. I quickly learned that British tribalism is subtler, but no less real. I was welcomed, yes — but also gently misplaced in categories that did not quite hold. Too African for some spaces. Too white for others. Too direct. Too warm. Not easily filed.
And so the oddity remained.

Yet I have come to see that the space between tribes is not empty. It is fertile. It forces listening. It teaches humility. It exposes the thinness of inherited labels. It presses one to ask harder questions about identity and home. If you cannot fully lean on the tribe, you must lean elsewhere.
This blog is an attempt to write from that elsewhere.
Not to romanticise the past. Not to rehearse grievances. Not to simplify South Africa into headlines or Britain into caricature. But remember carefully. To think honestly. To speak graciously. And to trace the quiet ways faith reshapes a life lived across borders.

I write as one who has lived in two countries and misunderstood both. As one who has seen beauty and brokenness sit side by side in farmyards and church halls. As one who has learned that belonging is less about fitting in and more about being rooted deeply enough to stand gently.
The reflections here will move between memory and present life — between cattle kraals and parish councils, between conscription days and Sunday sermons, between laughter in isiZulu and understatement in English tea rooms. They are fragments, perhaps. Marginal notes from a longer story.
That longer story is unfolding in a memoir titled  From My Tribe to Yours. If this space is the conversation, the book is its fuller telling — the shaping of memory into narrative, the tracing of a journey from inherited tribe toward a wider belonging grounded in grace.

For now, though, this is simply a beginning.
A place to stand in the space between tribes — and to discover that it may not be such an odd place to stand after all.


Some lives unfold between worlds, learning the language of both - I grew up in South Africa in a world far more complex than the one many people think they know. My life unfolded between cultures — from farms in the old Transvaal Province to KwaZulu-Natal, where I became fluent in Zulu, to working in townships around Durban during turbulent years and subsequently in a rural district in ministry during the final decade before South Africa’s democratic transition. Running quietly through those years was a journey of faith that eventually carried me far from Africa. What began as a five-year stay in the United Kingdom became an unintended exile, and today I live on the west coast of Scotland. My memoir, From My Tribe to Yours, is a personal letter across cultures — sharing the South Africa I experienced, that few in Western countries knew, from within. READ MORE:https://www.theafricanoddity.com/author-south-africa-memoir.html

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