Hey all - who's your daddy?

And who's your grand-daddy, for that matter? Why should you care? For some reason it does matter to people - enough to me, at least, that I called both my parents (on the same day!) to ask them about my family tree  - or in my case, family twig. But more on that later.

My curiosity was inspired partly by "Who Do You Think You Are?", an SABC 2 programme in which a diverse range of local celebs recently allowed Ancestry24 and the SABC to dig around in their genetic pool and find out where they're really from.

Which is how I ended up interviewing Riaan Cruywagen, the somewhat unchanging face of South African television, about what he discovered when he appeared on the show - and what it was like to be part of the genesis of TV in this country. Of course, interviewing Riaan was a bit like speaking to a fictional character. When he answered the phone: "Hello Riaan", with that muscular, almost outer-space voice, I nearly said "You know it's so weird, you sound exactly like Riaan Cruywagen!" Proud of the pioneer spirit he's inherited, he emailed back this answer to one of my questions: "My ancestors shared a common denominator – an urge to be free. Freedom from British imperialism is what my grandfather fought for in the Anglo Boer War. His father (my great-grandfather) was taken prisoner of war and sent to a camp at Bellary in the South of India, while the women and children had to endure appalling conditions in the British concentration camps." Is "De La Rey" on Riaan's iPod playlist, I wonder?

Comedian Kurt Schoonraad discovered, as he put it in our recent interview with him, that his "great great grandparents came to South Africa as coloured people" from St. Helena in the South Pacific.

Top SA actress Nthathi Moshesh also told me how she explored her Moshweshwe roots, mainly digging up greater details about what she'd always known due to her well-founded family pride. Who would she least like to discover she's related to? "Probably Hendrik Verwoerd", she reckons, laughing. Well I'm sure old Hendrik shares your fears, sister. And they're well-founded too. There's no such thing as "pure-blooded", and particularly in South Africa, where most of us third generationers share about 10% of our bloodline with "another" race. No wonder we're so sexy.

And what about me?  

Well, I am descended from a long line of bastards. Actually, a short line – tracing ancestry when your male ancestors took a "wham, bam, thank you ma'am, and I'll call you tomorrow, ha ha!" approach to parenting is pretty quick, because the trail goes dead within a few generations. My mother tells me that my great grandfather's birth certificate says "father unknown", because my great great gran (already widowed) got preggies while having it off with someone she couldn't marry if she wanted to keep the cash her rich late husband had left her. And on my father's side, my great gran (an unmarried midwife – so you'd think she knew something about birth control, but noooo) kept getting knocked up while fooling around with the village policeman, and shipped my grandfather and his sister off to an orphanage when they became an inconvenient expense.

So, my genes are overloaded with Anglo-Saxon blood, and I carry the DNA of people who bred their young not deliberately, but rather because they were feeling horny at the time. If I ever procreate, I intend to make sure it's with someone who at least tans easily enough to cope with the effects of global warming, and whose full name I can remember in the morning.

In the meantime, I'm proud of my grandparents and parents for bucking the trend after escaping moral degeneration in Europe, and sticking around long enough to send their offspring to school. Thanks guys.

Happy Father's Day. And Grandfather's Day. And Fathers Even Further Away Day. May you all live - or rest - in peace.