Viola May

Viola May’s story begins with the ocean. In Kalk Bay, the South African coastal village where she grew up, the sea never asked for an identity document, a racial classification, a gender, or an explanation of whom she loved. It simply carried the boats and embraced everything within its depths. 

For Viola, the ocean is inseparable from her identity. Her mother was a Black woman of Muslim heritage, her father a fisherman of Khoi Coloured ancestry, and she imagines that she was conceived aboard her father’s traditional wooden fishing boat, KB14.

Growing up in the 1970s meant growing up under apartheid. Yet Viola remembers something important about the resistance of that period: on the docks and in their homes, people could come together around a shared struggle for basic humanity. 

Race, religion, gender, and other categories did not necessarily define the bonds between them. They were united in resistance, embodying the spirit of Ubuntu—a way of understanding humanity through mutual care and connection.

That unity changed after 1994. Viola describes how the promise of a “better life” was accompanied by growing materialism and social division. Differences that had once seemed less important became increasingly visible and contested. 

The powerful collective cry of “Amandla!” gave way to judgment and shame, including condemnation of same-sex love and the weaponization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic against gay people.

It was within this fractured environment that Viola became a target because she loved women and lived openly as a lesbian. She describes surviving corrective rape, an act intended to impose male dominance and force her sexuality into a heterosexual framework. Her body became the battlefield upon which others attempted to enforce their ideas about gender, sexuality, and power.

But the violence could not destroy the deeper sense of self that Viola carried within her. She describes the trauma as scarring, yet also as something that clarified her determination to resist the fragmentation of the freedom earlier generations had fought to achieve. Her own experience became evidence of what happens when communities that once stood together become divided against themselves.

Viola argues that finding a path back toward liberation requires remembering this history honestly. In the Western Cape, Khoi heritage, Muslim roots, and working-class solidarity had created a protective ecosystem in which people relied upon one another. 

The ocean becomes her great teacher: its boundaries are fluid, its waters connect rather than separate, and its currents move across distinctions created by human beings.

That insight leads Viola to reclaim the complexity of her own identity. Being Muslim, Khoi, and queer does not have to mean choosing one identity over another. 

Different currents can meet within a single person just as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet around the southern tip of Africa. For Viola, liberation means allowing those identities to coexist powerfully rather than permitting society to use them to divide her.

She then expands the idea beyond South Africa. The water surrounding the KB14 is connected to oceans across the world, just as struggles for freedom have always been connected across borders. 

Viola sees parallels between civil-rights marches in the United States, anti-apartheid resistance in Cape Town, and liberation movements elsewhere. When people are pushed to the margins, she argues, they instinctively reach across borders and differences to find common ground.

At the heart of her vision is a striking idea: “love has no colours.” Viola remembers the love between her Black Muslim mother and her Khoi Coloured father as something that existed outside the racial categories imposed by apartheid. Their relationship became a sanctuary. In the same way, she argues, genuine love cannot be confined by racial classifications or rigid gender binaries.

For Viola, this is also a challenge to contemporary queer activism. Liberation requires an active Ubuntu—expanding our understanding of family, protecting trans and gender-nonconforming people, and refusing attempts to divide communities according to race, religion, economic status, or identity. Those with greater resources must remain connected to people still struggling for basic dignity.

The final section becomes deeply personal. After the violence she experienced, Viola returned to the two constants that had never demanded an explanation from her: the sea and the mountains. Three times a week she walked to the water. 

The sea became a kind of medicine, allowing the rhythm of the waves to replace the panic in her body and reconnecting her with her mother’s love and her father’s life as a fisherman.

And when the sea was her healing, the mountains became her armor. She climbed into the ancient peaks of the Cape, where the rock and fynbos created a place beyond the reach of the prejudice and violence of the streets. High above that world, she could breathe, ground herself, and exist without being forced into someone else’s definition of who she should be.

She arrives at a profound understanding of survival: it is not passive. It is intentional. It means anchoring the heart in deep water and building protection from the strength of the earth.