In the evening the sky over Cape Town veils itself in vermilion, rust and ochre as the sun sinks into its bed beyond the horizon. It is as if the many colours of the Rainbow Nation vaporise into the air and then bleed into the sky which shelters this most beautiful of earthly places.

It is said that if you stand at a certain point along the southernmost tip of the African continent, you can see the contour where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans merge, the waters of these separate bodies meeting to form a crest stretching towards eternity. I have stood at that point several times, imagining the infinity of time and space, peering with my mind’s eye into the unseen, the unknown.

The ocean here is cobalt blue, the beaches the colour of foam forming at the crest of the water. The journey that takes me from my homeland to the land of my mother’s birth charts a geographical tapestry beginning with desert and ending with the red earth of Africa, lush, fecund, verdant, rich with possibility.

I don’t know if it is the joy of retracing my mother’s footsteps or the sheer beauty of this continent which surges in my heart every time I arrive in Cape Town, the city of my childhood, a part of my soul. Perhaps it is the knowledge that I shall breathe the same air which nurtured her, born into a system where colour determined destiny, raised to resist that tyranny, struggling to restore human dignity to those whose skins bore the lacerated marks of ruthless oppression.

In Cape Town the air sings with many voices, it has the power to convince even the greatest cynic that there is strength in conviction, no matter how strong the grip of trepidation. My mother was born at the time that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had begun his journey of passive resistance, transforming the shock of being thrown off a train where he had mistakenly sat in a “whites only” compartment into a movement which saw the overthrow of British imperialism in the Empire’s largest colony, India. My mother’s political consciousness emerged out of the circumstances of her birth: the fifth and youngest daughter of Haji Omarji Ibrahim, a ship’s chandler who made his fortune during the Second World War, supplying the ships carrying troops from India to fight the war in Europe. It was the neighbourhood where she was born and grew up which made her the person she was, shaping her consciousness with the fine chisel of history.

Known as the Sixth District of the municipality of Cape Town, the neighbourhood occupied the slopes of the iconic Table Mountain, which looms over the city like the outstretched wings of an eagle. Intended to house slaves freed from the service of Dutch and English colonialists, District Six became the refuge of all those who travelled to this distant shore, willingly and at times under the yoke of servitude, enriching the coffers of the colonial economy and eventually becoming citizens of what was to become the Rainbow Nation, liberated after a long and difficult struggle led by Africa’s greatest son, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

My mother’s political education began on the streets of District Six where people of all colours had made their homes: European Jews from Lithuania, “Malays” or descendants of Indonesian political prisoners, the children of former slaves captured from Mauritania and Madagascar, and Indians from the state of Gujarat. The largest community in District Six was the “coloureds”, people of African and European descent, children of a history of slavery and institutionalised inequity. These were the people who taught my mother courage and compassion, the sanctity of human dignity, the ability to laugh in the face of adversity. The privileged environment of a relatively affluent home did not shelter my mother from the privation and indignity suffered by those who lived in the narrow alleys of her neighbourhood, sharing their crowded spaces with those who had even less. She suffered the injustice of a system seeking to marginalise those who were deemed less capable, less human, by those who extracted the wealth of the land, using the whip of apartheid with impunity. She saw the neglect and the abuse of entire generations that were forced to live in squalor, working the machinery of empire, accruing wealth for the handful of white rulers. She heard the voice of resistance on those streets, sung in words that were echoed by Nelson Mandela the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment on the infamous Robben Island.

I have stood on the shore where the oceans meet and I have looked out towards infinity. In the distance there is the shadow of that island, sanitised now of the cruelty inflicted upon Mr Mandela and his colleagues, incarcerated for having dared to resist injustice. I have seen that crest where the oceans meet, and I have heard the music of the voices that rise in unison as Africa mourns its greatest son, Madiba, Tata, Mandela, a lion of a man whose dreams paint the sky with the colours of an African sunset.