Haji Mohamed Dawjee chats about who should be reading her book, Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of a Brown Woman in a White South Africa
More about the book!

In Sorry, Not Sorry, Haji Mohamed Dawjee explores the often maddening experience of moving through post-apartheid South Africa as a woman of colour.

Why don’t white people understand that Converse tekkies are not just cool but a political statement to people of colour? Why is it that South Africans of colour don’t really ‘write what we like’? What’s the deal with people pretending to be ‘woke’? Is Islam really as anti-feminist as is claimed? What does it feel like to be a brown woman in a white media corporation? And what life lessons can we learn from Bollywood movies?

Dawjee chatted to Polity SA about her book.

‘The book was born out of a frustration of choking on my words in a post-democratic South Africa,’ Dawjee says. ‘For me, in my context growing up, no one teaches you how to have a conversation with white people, especially when you have to defend yourself, and I think white people have a lot of privilege, and they don’t understand that we come from different backgrounds.

‘Then obviously you get a segment of what they call themselves is “woke whites”, they don’t realise that they take over the conversation for people of colour, and they speak on behalf of them.

‘So this book is book is a way of speaking on behalf of myself, as a woman of colour, as a brown woman, and also hopefully speaking of other people of colour as well – not for them, but just for them to relate to certain experiences.

‘But then at the same time I also do want white people to challenge themselves and read this book as well and start introspecting and asking themselves really hard questions. If, of course, they’ve read enough.’