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.