This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to full disclosure, a podcast project designed chiefly to let me spend more time with fascinating people than is ordinarily available on my radio show.

And I think it's fair to say that this week's guest, Michael Holding,

fits very, very neatly into that category. Michael, thank you so much for your time today.

That's for having me, it strikes me that yours is a life in three acts, or at least your public life is in three acts, with the third act perhaps being the most surprising, I think, for both

observers of your career. And I sense sometimes for you as well. And we'll focus heavily on that

a little later in the interview. But I want to begin, if I may, with the first two. And to begin

in the Jamaica of your birth, eight years, I think, before independence.

And a sort of curious introduction to some of the issues that you've been focusing on lately as well.

When your parents got together, it began controversially.

Yes, it did, but I wasn't aware of it, James.

Well, of course.

No, what I mean is even as a young man growing up, I didn't know anything about the history of my parents getting together and exactly what my mother in particular went through.

You know, her family pretty much divorced her, ostracized her because she married a black man.

And she was about the complexion of what you would say as a Cape Colored South African mixed race.

And, you know, my father was very dark.

Anyone who looks at me and can see how dark I am must.

And then imagine how dark he must have been

to produce me with a mixed race,

almost a fierce skin woman.

But, you know, it never affected my life growing up.

She never made us aware that there was a problem.

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