In the 1960s the Group Areas Act was enforced in Rondebosch, a suburb in Cape Town, which was declared a "White" residential area by the apartheid government. All other residents were forcibly removed from the neighbourhood. Sydney Petersen's father, the well-known Afrikaans-language poet and school principal S.V. Petersen, took legal advice and refused to move, resisting the family's race classification as "Coloured".