Zoe, the little that shows of your picture suggests you have those amazing facial features I see all around me on the young black girls in this tiny Eastern Free State town. I could try the describe how I see the far fewer white, some blonde, girls around, but it would be unfair to both, because it is something you are either blessed with or you're not.

But it is not something you can choose or reject, it is yours and yours only. So is my "whiteness" and so also is my "white privilege". At your age, or at least in my teens and early twenties, before 1992/4, I may not have been as poetic or as expressive as you, but I felt emotions similar to those I read in your article. I did not have the same motivations as you, I was not oppressed and I'm not sure I can convince you that I had the interest of your people at heart, nor that it was a pure emotion rather that the condescension of what today would be called the "colonist". But I did.

It is your leaders that have failed you, not us.