Category: Racial justice

Last week at Wits Art Museum (WAM) I met Anthony Nsofor, an artist from Nigeria who is in Joburg for a month to be inspired and make art. We were both there to see the Black Modernisms show. I filled him in on the tension that had brewed around the show.

The show had been curated from WAM’s archives by Wits Professor Emeritus Anitra Nettleton, a white art historian, and included pieces that had been created by black artists during the period 1940-80, a period that slots into that which European art historians define as Modernist.

A furious debate broke out on social media and in the press when black Wits research associates, Dr Same Mdluli and Bongani Mahlangu, who had been billed as co-curators of the exhibition, distanced themselves, saying that they had very little say its conception and curation, that they had been used as black tokens to give the exhibition validity, and that not only did the exhibition omit key black artists from that period, it made the mistake of continuing to use a European label in which to frame black expression.

“Modernism concerns the avant-garde and a period marked by departure in Europe from royalties to republics made possible by the cross-Atlantic slave trade. Advancement for Europe saw the oppression of blacks. We have to ask what makes art by black artists modern,” argued Khwezi Gule, chief curator of the Soweto museums.

“One would expect a university to be at the forefront of creating new knowledge in a post-colonial society,” says Nontobeko Ntombela, a member of Black Mark: Collective Critical Thought (BMCCT) which convened a public forum to discuss the matter. “Why would we want to continue to situate art as colonial, nativist tropes? By doing that the black body remains the problem.”

This failure to interrogate the dominant art paradigms was put at the white feet of Nettleton who was accused of presiding over a white women network which continues to wields institutional power through its social network, to have a paternalistic view towards black artists, thus “perpetuating the myth that white power brokers are still needed and relevant.”

The debate had deepened when Nettleton hit back by labelling the criticisms as a personal attack.

I explained this Tony over a coffee in the WAM café.

“We’re at a point when the narrative is shifting, new voices are emerging and strengthening, and as a white person, you are questioning your relevance. It’s fascinating and unnerving,” I admit.

We continued together out onto the streets of Braamfontein, stopping in at the Stevenson gallery, where there was a show made up mostly of neon colours and abstract shapes.

“What did you think? “ asked Tony as we left the gallery.

“I didn’t really get it, so I didn’t like it,” I replied.

“But why do you need to get something from it?” he asked.

I think for a moment.

“Aren’t we all trying to make sense of ourselves in this world? When you see art that seems to represent what you’ve been thinking about, it makes you feel less alone,” I say.

We walk round the corner. Tony spots a pink rose petal lying on the pavement. He picks it up.

“See this rose petal. When I see it, I do not ask why it’s there. I just pick it up and admire its delicate skin, its pale pink edges. I do not ask why. We permit nature to perform without asking why. We can love this petal when it falls on the floor without it having a reason for being there, so why can we not permit the same from human beings when they make art? Why must it always have meaning?”

I nod. “It’s a good point. Why do we expect different from humans? Maybe because we are always trying to explain each other to each other. Often misunderstanding each other. Maybe when you see art that reflects something you have been thinking back at you, you feel like you’ve been understood,” I say.

“But that’s so self-centred. Why must it always be about you?” he asks.

I laugh. “Fair point. Maybe it’s a South African thing. Maybe we are so desperately seeking meaning, we are always bringing it back to ourselves.”

We carry on walking up to Constitution Hill. I want to show him our Constitutional Court, an architectural masterpiece built with bricks from the old holding cells. A building thick with meaning. On the way, we stop in at the old Women’s Gaol, where female political prisoners were once held. I greet the security guard in Zulu. She shakes her head. The building is closed. My shoulders fall a little. We step back outside.

There is something in the tone of that exchange that moves him. He stops. He looks at me.

“I think I get it. I think I understand now how lonely it must be. You do belong here, but everyone is always questioning you.”

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb

Written September 2014

I met Lerato at the Benoni Museum, in the room dedicated to the history of my hometown, Benoni. Benoni is a Hebrew word which means Son of my Sorrows. I was standing in front of a board that boasted about the building of Daveyton, the township next to Benoni, describing it as a “a model township”. The words are lifted from a book published during apartheid.

“Can you believe this is still up?” I ask the young guy standing next to me.

He reads, his arms folded, his hand on his mouth, and nods.

“I live in Daveyton. It is a nice place,” he says.

“But, but… don’t you get it. It is old apartheid propaganda. It is trying to justify that it was okay for black people to be put into separate areas.”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“I grew up in Attridgeville. Daveyton is a much better place.”

He introduces himself as Lerato, a 22-year-old student at Benoni Technical College. Lerato tells me that he moved to Daveyton to escape gang crime in Attridgeville. His friends had all joined gangs and he wanted more from his life, and so he left his grandmother to live with his mother and her husband.

“And is Daveyton much safer?” I say.

“No, nowhere is safe,” he says, shaking his head. “Not being able to walk around with your belongings. That’s not life. The other day I saw a woman being robbed in front of me, and there was nothing I could do. They say it’s a free and democratic country, but you don’t enjoy your freedom. Every day a child is dead. You cannot call that freedom.”

A week later Lerato invites me to visit him in his kasi (neighbourhood). At 10am on a Saturday morning I find myself in the Daveyton mall, looking for Love. That’s what Lerato means, love.

Love is stuck in a queue though, trying to help a friend wire money to Zimbabwe, and so I go shopping. In one of the cheap fashion chains, I spot a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “You can’t sit with us”.

I consider buying it and wearing it around Daveyton. Definitely a Chinese import.

At last Love is ready.

We drive back to Barcelona, his kasi.

“I can’t believe it,” his mum, Victoria Ralefeta, says, welcoming to her home with an enveloping hug. “Lerato said he had a white friend and I told him he must be fucking dreaming.”

I’ve never heard a black mamma swear before. I snort with laughter as she squeezes me.

Victoria invites us into the front room of her home, and offers us a seat on the lounge suite, in front of a TV switched on to Soweto TV. On the walls are 3D pictures of elephants, waterfalls and Jacob Zuma. If you shift to the right, the picture of Zuma morphs into Mandela. He wishes.

Victoria treats us to a bottle of Coca Cola, and tells us about her younger life, working as a domestic worker.

“How did you come to terms with apartheid during those years?” I ask. “What did you tell yourself to make it bearable in your own head?”

“I told myself it was a bad spirit,” Victoria says. “There are two people controlling our lives – god and devil. And devil is more powerful than god, if you allow him. Apartheid was nothing, just a bad spirit.”

Lerato takes us on a stroll through the neighbourhood. A woman is braaiing chicken feet on a corner. A barber is cutting hair in a converted portakabin. Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier is playing through an open front door. As we walk past the spaza shop, an amapanstula comes out.

“Umlungu!” White person! he shouts, dropping his peanuts to the floor and starting to dance.

Lerato is delighted.

“Everyone is going to be talking about this. I’m going to be the guy, who brought the white girl to the kasi.”

We make to turn left.

“Err, no, we can’t go that way,” Lerato says. “Too dangerous.”

“Oh right,” I say, a flash of fear grabbing my belly.

Lerato laughs. “No, not dangerous for you. You could walk anywhere here. No one would touch you. They’d be too busy staring.”

Back at the house we gnaw on chicken feet and drink Coke.

“You know life is a boomerang,” says Victoria. “I can tell you I don’t even have fifty cents in my house now, but I’ve got food. So why do I want money? Money for what? Money can’t change my life. As long as I can eat with my children, it’s fine. When suffering comes, the white people cannot handle it. We, us black people, we can handle it. The white people can’t take suffering, because the money is controlling them.”

Follow me on Twitter @writerclb

Written September 2014

Trevor Davies lives in a small three-bedroom house in Cosmo City. It reminds me of the house I used to live in Crystal Park in Benoni. Trevor and I went to school together, Benoni High. Trevor is white. He is married to Chrissie, a black American woman. Together they have three children.

Trevor and Chrissie met at university in Portland, America. It was a campus of 14,000 students, only 99 were black. There was virtually no racial integration and there had been incidents of racial intimidation, including black people getting urinated on. Trevor and Chrissie, both Christians, joined the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship which was on a mission to improve race relations on campus.

“I was highly aware of my place as a white South African,” remembers Trevor. “I remember going to a platform about being from Africa and being the only white guy, and feeling the weight of knowing my history, and asking what right I had to even be there.”

As they began to confront the issue of race on campus, what they realised was that there was no space where people could deal with their ignorance, and so they started a group called Race Matters, where people from all ethnicities could come together and ask any question they wanted. They would then break out into race-specific groups, try as honestly as possible to answer the question, and then share their insights back to the group as a whole.

“What we found was that white people had never thought about race. They had no thoughts on it. But as they started to hear the stories from the black and Asian participants, they started to feel guilt and shame and anger,” remembers Trevor.

Trevor admits he was one of them.

“I only became away of the story of South Africa because everyone in America knew it. I only knew what really happened after I came home in 2008 and went to the Apartheid Museum and sat down and watched the videos of people toyi-toyiing and protesting. We never saw that. We never saw that on TV. But the people in America, they had seen it all. Everyone knew what had happened in South Africa, but not me. I realised I needed to become aware.”

But becoming aware, Trevor admits, is not easy.

“It is jarring. Everyone else has continued on as if nothing has really changed. In Benoni particularly. I wrestle with that. I am judgemental towards those Benoni South Africans and their unwillingness to live in Africa.”

Trevor recalls a fight he had with his brother.

My brother was buying a house and it all worked out well and they felt like it was God who gave them that house. So then I was like, my friends are living in a shack in Zandspruit. They have been praying for twenty years for a house and still they do not have one. Do you think that God does not answer their prayers? The reality is that God did not get you that house. You got that house because you had a friend you knew who was generous who gave you the house at a discount and because you knew a banker who was able to facilitate the loan and a mom who co-signed for it. It was privilege that enabled you to get that house. But that conversation didn’t go down very well. “

“No, it didn’t,” says Chrissie, smiling and raising her eyebrows.

I ask Chrissie how it has been for her, moving to South Africa.

“A little insane,” she says, laughing. “Moving here was like going back to the fifties. Even going to Oregon or the west coast which is like the whitest part of the US, and being an interracial couple, was more welcoming than being here and having it gawked at and pointed at.”

Chrissie recalls their honeymoon in Kwazulu Natal. They were at Ushaka to watch the dolphin show.

“I was so excited to see the dolphins, and this lady kept looking at us, and for me, I was thinking, she must think she knows us. Then she made a big fuss and pretended to take pictures like as if she was at a zoo, taking pictures of some monstrosity, and I remember thinking: she’s really angry and she doesn’t even know me. This is the 1950s.”

One of the hardest parts has been how Chrissie is treated with her mixed race kids.

“I’ll be in the shops and people will say to me: “That can’t be your child, no. You must be the nanny. Are you the nanny? Is that your job? I’m like, do you really want to hear about her birth story and how many hours of labour I was in?” she says laughing. “On good days I just reply, yes she is. On bad days, I give them what for.”

I have to accept that my role is to teach and it is hard because it is my life that is on display. I can’t go to the grocery store and get milk without somebody saying something. It is a daily experience, especially with my most light-skinned daughter.”

I ask Trevor how living in Cosmo City has impacted on his own personal transformation.

“Do you still feel flickers of white superiority?” I ask.

“I think it’s always there. It’s a continuous wrestle to figure out what the truth is and to see clearly. As a family we deal with this stuff a lot. Our middle child comes home and tells us that she loves her mom, but she doesn’t like that she’s brown, she would prefer to be white and loves Barbie,” Trevor says.

“This is in our life all the time,” says Chrissie. “We are trying to work with our kids to understand who they are, their story…”

“I wrestle with it, should white people be given the grace that they seem like they need? I don’t feel like it,” says Trevor.

“What do you mean by grace?” I ask.

“It’s been 20 years, they are still living in South Africa and they haven’t really budged. They complain about how everything is done, how bad the ANC is, and blaah blaah blaah, a long sob story of how everyone has messed up this fantastic country that was built by them, while it was the black people who actually built it, they just made the plans. White people, will argue they worked hard to build the country. And they did. But the difference was, when they worked hard they were rewarded. Whereas those folks at Marikana, they are still working hard and still not being rewarded. That’s the difference.

“I feel like: how long does one need? If you are going to play ignorance forever, you are going to get the EFF in its full wrath, and it’s going to be a mess, and I think you’ve asked for that. And you are going to get it, and you are going to lose stuff that you really care about, because you have chosen to pretend. What is it going to take for white folks to realise that they live in Africa?

“You hear white folks say that I am begging to be African. Or that I am African. But,” and here he shorts with laughter, “they are completely disengaged which the struggles of Africa. They want to live in Bryanston, and live in Africa, and go to the bush. So… even at the church we go to, people are saying they want to change. We are trying to create spaces for people to actually talk about what it would take to engage well. Starting with relationships, getting to know people, simple things. People’s desire for this, is very low. Most folks are not really interested. They will ride the train when it’s the World Cup, when the train has been cleaned and painted, but otherwise, they don’t want to come here. They’re terrified.”

 

Written June 2016

I was part of the last generation to grow up under apartheid. I am a white writer who interrogates my mind and soul about the myths of white superiority and racial difference. I probe. I interrogate. I make myself uncomfortable. I make others uncomfortable.

A year ago I finished writing a book, Lost Where I Belong, a memoir, extended essay, in which I investigated, over five years, why it was so hard for me to feel truly equal to my fellow South Africans, despite our democracy, our progressive Constitution, the promise of equality. The story is not just my own. I travel to the rural lands headed up by chiefs, I return to the claustrophobic streets of my suburban Benoni childhood, I walk the streets of downtown Johannesburg, gathering the stories of my fellows, the others, so many of us lost in transformation. The main thread of the story though is mine. The white soul is the one under the lens.

Lost Where I Belong is represented by a respected literary agent. The book has been read and considered by editors at the world’s top publishing houses. Again and again it has been commended for being “beautifully written”. Thank you. But the pretty words and sentences are not enough to switch on the printing presses. Why not?

In the words of one editor:

“It’s a book that really took a hold of me at times and nagged at me even when I wasn’t reading it.  This is of course because what she addresses is so potent and distressing but mainly because of the forensic honesty of her quest and her writing, her willingness to confront the apartheid within, to work through the fact that she is inextricable from the history.  The book has a moral weight to it that is inescapable and very affecting.  You will appreciate, then, I hope, that it is only with a great deal of personal regret that I’m writing to say that I can’t see a place for Claire’s book here.  The very honest truth is that I think it would simply be very hard to persuade a large enough audience to engage with it, even though I’m sure that those who did so would find it very powerful.”

The others concur.

There is not a big enough market.

People will not buy it.

We cannot make enough money.

White people will not spend money on something that makes them uncomfortable.

By chance I cross paths with a white liberal, South African struggle-generation journalist reads it. He reads the book in one sitting. The book makes him angry.

“Framing it chronologically as the odyssey of a wide-eyed, guilt-stricken innocent seems to me a grave mistake that is bound to limit its appeal and put backs up. Drawing attention from the start to how little you knew while you were growing up in South Africa, as well as how relatively little time you have spent there since you left, plays not to your strength but to your weakness. Your strength is the perspective your early experiences give you now, 21 years after apartheid, and that, I believe, is the book’s true subject.”

I am not permitted to write about ignorance. I am not permitted to write about a journey from ignorance to awareness. From being closed to being conscious.

Our transformation must happen off stage, when no one is looking, otherwise it is too humiliating, too angering, too shaming.

One should not speak of such things.

Silenced by the capitalist system. This book will not make enough money.

Silenced by the liberal system. We cannot admit to such things.

Silenced by the racist system. We must not break rank.

Only the victims may speak – because they will make us money. Only the victims must speak so we, the liberal saviours who control the publishing industry, will continue to look good.

Only the victims must speak so the world will stay polarised and all will be not well.

Written January 2016

Whiteness is new. It didn’t exist in conversations or in the press before 2015. It has been birthed by a new generation of left-wing South African youth who regard the state as an unholy alliance between the last of the revolutionary leaders and multinational capitalists, whose priority is to feed the foreign investors and political fat cats at the expense of the poor.

Whiteness is used pejoratively to describe and critique the privilege of the white-skinned population.

Why not just use the word white?

Well, because whiteness comes in different shades, different strengths.

Absolute whiteness is equated with absolute privilege. These are the people who drive BMWs, take overseas holidays, work in mining, send their children to private schools, live in gated communities, never set foot in the city centre, have never been to Soweto and never intend to. Absolute whiteness exists in an absolute bubble of absolute privilege. It is an extreme which does not describe the lives of all of the 9.2 million white South Africans. (And which also describes the lives of some black South Africans. However.)

A paler shade of whiteness exists in the ordinary white: the person getting by on an average salary, who drives a small car, who do not own swathes of land – maybe just a little house in Westdene – and who feels they have neither economic, moral nor political power.

When those whites South African try to deny their privilege, the rebuff is that they still have whiteness because of the system.

When something goes bump in the night, the police come because they are white.

When traffic cops are pulling people over, they do not get pulled over.

When they run out of money, they know what to ask the bank manager to lend them some more.

Ordinary whites have whiteness because they understand the machinery of the capitalist system, because they are part of an extended network of people, among which are definitely people who would be able to bale them out.

To have whiteness is to have a safety net.

Even though they might argue, they don’t feel very safe.

But still, comes the reply, you are still safer than me.

And so, regardless of your circumstances, if you are white you are guilty of whiteness.

Guilty, of course, because whiteness is not a nice thing.

Well, that is not quite correct. Whiteness is a nice thing in that it harbours enviable things like a BMW, private schooling, a good job in mining, a nice home and a safety net.

But it is a bad nice thing because it is not an earned thing. Whiteness is a privilege that has been acquired unfairly, through a political system that oppressed black people, that stole land, and so although the trappings of whiteness are desirable, whiteness itself is despised, and right now it makes everyone feel uncomfortable. Especially whites.

Because well, the things is, in the same way that not everyone who has been a smoker gets throat cancer but everyone who gets throat cancer has been a smoker; so not everyone who is white has complete privilege, but everyone who has complete privilege is white.

And on an average day, in an average street, there’s no way of telling the cancer patients from the non-cancer patients.

Everyone looks sick.

Everyone looks white.

Written February 2016

A few years ago, while tapping away on my laptop during a flight to Cape Town, the woman sitting next to me asked me if I was writing a book.

I was. She asked me what it was about. At the time, my answer changed, depending on who was asking. I decided to give this 60-year-old white South African woman the long answer.

I had been an Open Society Foundation fellow. I had spent three months in the old Transkei investigating what democracy had – and hadn’t – brought to rural South Africa. During that journey I had run headlong into my own fears, prejudice and ignorance. I was writing a book confronting the racist shadows in me, a 38-year-old English-speaking South African.

“Would you read it if you saw it on the shelf?” I asked her.

She sighed.

“It’s very difficult for me to pick up one of those books and read,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Tangled emotions of guilt and regret and deep, deep sorrow.”

I waited quietly, waiting for her to say more.

“We’re in a bit of haze, perhaps we’ve had to develop that to survive. I’m sorry that we are so dulled, that there is a dullness of interest, it’s just as though…” she thought for a while, “I think we had to fall asleep. For survival. To live with guilt and regret is too painful.”

Her words echoed something I had read in Jonathan Jansen’s book Knowledge in the Blood. In it he discusses Shattered Past, research that examiened the behaviour of post-war German communities. The research found that even after the communities came to have direct knowledge of the killings and torture of Jews, “the majority of the population rather preferred to cover its own complicity with merciful silence”.

For close on twenty years many whites South Africans acted similarly. Silence was the norm and when you did address “it”, it was often reduce to two words: “white guilt”. Go out of your way for a black person and a colleague might mockingly chide: “white guilt!” Turn away from a beggar, pretending that neither of you are there, and your conscience would taunt the same. Try raise the topic of apartheid and its link to poverty, poor education or crime at a braai, and the reply would be: “Enough of the white guilt already.” White guilt didn’t like to chat.

This week, I found myself reflecting on how the conversation has shifted, how 21 years later, silence and white guilt are no longer in charge. Since late last year, “whiteness” and “white privilege” have become the new buzz words, and the uncomfortable thing about these new labels are they invented for us by people who are not us. People outside of us are describing our behaviour. They are defining and framing our lives. They are labelling our own, ordinary, every day, sometimes shitting, sometimes amazing lives as a stolen good. How dare they? How dare they judge us? After all, we all know how the thieves are around here, don’t we?

Oh yes, the dialogue is shifting. Our culpable silence is being broken, and we are feeling angry, exposed and defenceless. What are we supposed to do now?

Well, if the Shattered Past research is anything to go by, what is happening now is as typical as our 20 years of silence. Just over twenty years after the end of the Second War, the old Germans to begin to die out, opening up a space for a new generation of thinkers and writers who were able to observe the past with a new critical consciousness.

And what is equally fascinating is what else the Shattered Past research noticed, namely that “the capacity for perpetrators to change only arose after the political elites recognized more than one pain and ‘the link between the suffering of the victims and the perpetrators’ was established.”

In other words, society as a whole had to start setting aside some compassion for the bad guys.

In post-war Germany, the blanket of silence had meant Germans had been stopped from processing their own war wounds: the rape they had suffered at the hands of the Russians, the deaths of the German soldiers, the intimidation and fear culture that had been Nazi Germany. This new consciousness also brought in a phase where those personal losses and griefs were permitted.

And I find myself wondering: is that we need to do? To permit the wretched white South Africans with their fortress houses and 4x4s and don’t seem to give a fuck about anyone but themselves, to have an opportunity to express their personal pain?

Now I admit, it’s hard to feel anything except contempt for some white South Africans. This past Valentine’s weekend I was down at the Vaal River and felt like chucking all this attempt at inter-racial healing in, as I witnessed the selfishness of those white South Africans, with their jet skis and speed boats, who driven drunk on the river, back to their vast houses that look more like fortresses than homes. How does one have compassion for people who seem to treat the world as just a giant playground, hoarding all the toys for themselves? Who are these people?

But I found myself wondering what lurks there, beneath all that bravado and shiny toys and heavy drinking?

In his book Jansen remembers how destitute the white Afrikaners were at the end of the South African War. They had been chased from Europe because of their religious faith, and then they had been defeated on the land that they tried to build a new home. And out of this defeat, poverty and fear, they rose again, and this time they tried to create a nation that no one could destroy, and they lost that too.

What lies in these people who have lost and lost and lost? Is that why they hoard? Is that why they close ranks? Is that why they have retreated to their fortresses? What will they say when they break their silence?

Written February 2016

Six years ago I was awarded an Open Society Foundation media fellowship. My idea was to spend three months in the old Transkei, interviewing the rural South Africans of Pondoland and Thembuland about what democracy had – and had not – brought to their lives.

I set myself up as an objective reporter, on an objective mission. It was 2010, and I was tired of how, back then, the newspapers were dominated by stories of crime, corruption and the voices of Zuma and Malema, the political elite. I wanted to know what my fellow citizens thought, how we the people were really getting on with our democracy.

I set off alone on the road, a lone female journalist roaming the Transkei in a bakkie, and quickly realised that my so-called objective mission was a flawed project. I had grown up in Benoni during the last days of apartheid, and despite my media credentials (I was being backed by an editor at TIME magazine) within days I found myself face to face with my fears, ignorance and prejudice – the apartheid shadows that haunts all of us who grew up in that time.

Over the next five years, with more return visits to the Transkei, that journey became a book, titled Lost Where I Belong. It is a book of two halves. Partly, it documents the stories of rural South Africans and their sense of ‘being lost in transformation’, all the white framing their stories against my own feelings of loss, longing and not belonging.

Since then the book has courted many publishers, and is now represented by a wonderful literary agent in London, and yet – in 2016 – it has yet to find a publisher. Why?

Again and again I have been told that there is simply not a big-enough market for a book that probes and pushes at racism and white prejudice.

While the book has been struggled to find a platform, Keke Motseke, Anisha Panchia and I, have created a platform of another kind: the Consciousness Café. In inspiring spaces around the country, we bring South Africans together to engage in honest, bear-all conversations about the shadows of racism and prejudice that exist in all of our hearts.

This past Saturday Consciousness Café popped up at the Spaza Gallery in Troyeville. What shocked me – and most of the white people present – was to hear how every black South African in the room, including the glamorous girls with MBAs and BMWs who most white South Africans would describe as ‘sorted’ and ‘privileged’, continue to experience racism on a daily basis. Being told there is no place for them to sit in an empty restaurant. Being overlooked for promotions and pay rises. Being given a lower grade than their white classmates, despite the fact that they were working in a group, and everybody else in the group got the same grade.

Really? In 2016? With a black majority government? This is happening? And perhaps what was more shocking was the way they said they reacted when this happened to them. They kept silent. They said nothing. It was better that way. Nobody likes an angry black person.

It just reminded me again how the system wants us to stay silent. It is comfortable that way. It does not want the voices out.

Written  October 2015

A strange day. This morning I finished editing my book, Lost Where I Belong, sent it off to my literary agent,  and then walked down to Campus Square in Melville to browse the stores and pick up some groceries.

In the Pick ‘n Pay, the lady on the till asks me where I am from.

“South Africa,” I tell her.

“You don’t look like it,” she says

“Why not? What looks different?” I ask.

She says my skin looks different.
I replied that it can’t. It is just an ordinary white skin. An olive skin that tans easily, like that of many others raised under the African sun.

I get out my green ID book to prove that indeed, I am a South African citizen.

She shakes her head in surprise.

“It must be something else about me that makes you think that though,” I say, intrigued. She is not the first person to say that I do not look like a white South African. I have heard this before. It is a familiar rif. The accusation, when it comes, is never based on my accent – which admittedly, despite my Benoni upbringing, is not heavily South African – but always on the way I look. The lady packing bags agrees with her.

“What do you think it is about me that makes me seem different?” I ask them both.

They shake their heads. Thinking.

“Do you think it might be the way I look at you that makes me different?” I ask.

The way I look out in the world, I know, is different. I know because it is something I do consciously. Something which I have come to do, through a five-year journey in which I have sometimes pushed, sometimes coaxed myself, to unravel my apartheid conditioning and confront the prejudice in me.

Now, whenever I look at my fellow South Africans, especially people I am meeting for the first time, I consciously look at the human being that is there, that predates their job, their gender and their race. My human sees their human. That is my starting point.

As I left the Pick ‘n Pay a young lad, about 19, his clothes torn, asks me for some money. The human in me sees the human in him, acknowledging that our wellbeing is interconnected, and in this moment, I am able to spare R5 from my wallet.

As I continue on, an Asian man in a car slows to a stop. He rolls down the electric window and asks if I am walking into Melville. I nod and he tells me “to get in, I’ll give you a ride.” The human in me sees the human in him and I know with certainty, that he is not to be trusted. I shake my head and wave him hurriedly away. The more we practice being human, the more we know who truly to fear.

Written February 2016

Last night I was lying in bed, thinking again about one of the frequent conversations that comes up at Consciousness Café and other race dialogues I’ve attended – “I’ve admitted my white privilege, now what?”

It’s a question that generally irritates the black participants who often reply: “That’s not my problem. You need to work out what to do.”

And it’s a tricky one for white participants because, quite obviously, when we face up to our white privilege, it makes us feel uncomfortable.

I mean, there you sit, in your decent house (even if it’s a small house in Westdene), with your decent car (even if it’s the smallest Kia), in your decent job (even if it’s a bottom-of-the-rung position where you earn R10,000 a month, holding your smart phone with a private security company on speed dial (even though you haven’t paid them for 5 months), and Medical Aid that gives you direct entrance to the MediClinic rather than a queue at Helen Jospeh, and well, you know that even though your life is kind of average, it’s still loads better off than the people who see squeezed into the MetroBus every day, and you feel uncomfortable, because well, you don’t really want to be without the house, the Kia, the medical aid, the smart phone, because these things are what make up your life – they are part of your culture, they kind of define who you are.

And so the question they are really asking is: what do you want me do with this my comfortable discomfort?

Last night I was lying in bed thinking about this, and I suddenly remembered a phrase that we use to talk about among ourselves before the black South African youth began to hold us to account with words like whiteness and privilege. Do you remember white guilt?

White guilt was that uncomfortable, embarrassed feeling, that you knew that your life was way, way, way better off than all these poor black people that the white government had oppressed, and so you, who felt ashamed of that, would hand out money to beggars and car guards, and maybe start a project somewhere, always with this sort of fake, resigned, uncomfortable smile on your face, and somewhere in your conscience you would tell yourself you were doing your bit, while the new government got on with dealing with the big job of building new schools, reforming education curricula, electrifying the rural areas.

But the other key truth about white guilt is that it was frowned upon.

“White guilt!” so-called friends would shout, raise an eyebrow, brand you, when you tried to do something, anything, that might improve the life of a fellow black citizen. White guilt became a kind of slur. Something not to act on. Something, in itself, to hide, to be ashamed of. The Rainbow Nation didn’t like white guilt because it was like a kind of underhanded admission that we were not all equal, while we were all pretending to be.

When I sent a first draft of Lost Where I Belong, my book where I travel alone through the old Transkei, on a journey to confront the fear, ignorance and prejudice in myself, the publishing house responded saying:

“There is nothing exceptional in this account which rehearses no more than conventional ‘liberal’ positions but set as it is as a counter-theme in the essay it raises some uncomfortable questions. For example is it, and the essay itself, anything more than a self-congratulatory and exculpatory gesture?”

I had to look up “exculpatory”. It turns out it means any evidence offered in a criminal trial that attempts to exonerate the defendant of guilt. I found it curious that an attempt to introspect, to question my place in this mess, was written off and denigrated as “white guilt”.

Socrates once wrote that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’. White guilt was the system’s way of gagging and silencing introspection.

 

 

Written, January 2016

This morning we woke to the wavering voices of Islamic singing. Today was a Muslim festival and there was an early-morning parade in the streets. Together with the crumbling stone buildings and the colourful wooden dhows bobbing in the sea, it felt like we had woken 500 years ago.

Over breakfast we learnt how Ilha is famous in all of Mozambique for its racial and religious tolerance. Churches sit side by side with mosques; skin colours matter little, and those who have live easily beside those who have not. This morning we went for a swim off the end of the pier. A group of young Moslem guys jumped in in their clothes, a black mother in a bikini took her tiny baby for its first swim in the sea, and a white tourist with flowing red hair went snorkelling. People here walk with a quiet dignity. Everyone matters.

It is something of a balm to be among this. I was very upset when I boarded the flight to Nampula. I had been involved in a discussion on “This Dialogue Thing”, a closed Facebook group committed to dialoguing honestly on the racist tropes that are still thick in the South African psyche in which a black South African was professing his hatred for all white South Africans, and warning of an imminent war.

Like many other whites on the forums, I had responded, trying to show that he was being heard, that we were listening to how he felt, and then together with black South Africans, suggested that by provoking whites so that they show their racist colours – which he admitted he did – was never going to lead towards much healing. Before I boarded the flight I had checked the thread again, and saw that instead of responding to many of the comments in the thread, he had started a new thread in which he just re-emphasised how much he hated, hated, hated white South Africans.

As the plane took off I felt distraught – and fear.

Distraught for the dialogue and fear for the thought that if this plane crashed it would not matter one iota to the world. It would just be another plane crash in Africa. But if this plane crashed in Europe, everyone would care. I was a despised white person on a plane that no one cared about.

The man next to me took out his book and the title was “Coragem para Vivar”, Courage for Life. I asked him if he was a pastor, and he said he was, that he was from the Macua tribe in the north of Mozambique, and wanted to do a Phd in Theology in Pretoria, and so I told him about the work I was involved in with Consciousness Café – how we create spaces in the world, not online, where South Africans can come together to talk about the apartheid demons that haunt them –  and how hard it was, and how I had been asking God/the universe/myself what I could say to take that hatred away. As I spoke my eyes filled with tears and my voice wobbled, and I asked what he thought. He said it is very hard, and just asked if he could pray for us, and so he did.

I think what bothered me so much about the hatred espoused by the young man on Facebook, was that it was considered justified. That it is okay that a young black man is permitted to hate me – someone he has never met – on the grounds that people with white skins in the past imprisoned/killed his father or uncle (because, by his story, that seems to be the real root of his hatred).

Right now, received wisdom is that only whites can be racist, because racism is an organised system by which one group oppresses by the other. If you can’t oppress, then you can’t be racist.

So what is individual hatred based on skin colour? This, we are told, is just racial prejudice, to which the subtext seems to be that racial prejudice is okay/justified, while racism is not.

And the question is: at which point does it shift? At which point do you reach the critical mass in which enough people hate and that hatred become a system?

I guess I am finally feeling what racism/racial prejudice really feels like. This might not be allowed to be called racism – just as white South Africans used to say that apartheid was not racist “just good neighbourliness” – but now I know how it feels and you know what, it really sucks, and it really hurts and I totally get it. It is so dehumanising. I know I am more than my skin colour.