John Matshikiza
With the Lid Off
So what has changed in the past five years? I’ve seen quite a lot of this country recently, travelling both by road and by air. South Africa remains a highly peculiar place. In the air, the service has got much better, and the cabin crews no longer seem to be terrified of black passengers. In fact, many more of the cabin crew are black themselves these days.
In other ways, things remain the same. All the airlines, including that cheeky and short-lived upstart Flitestar, initially made an attempt at adding an embarrassed greeting in Zulu or Fanagalo to their otherwise strictly bilingual announcements. The initiative didn’t last long, and we’re back to being resolutely tweetaalige. Nobody seems to be turning a hair.
I’m not saying that every flight has to be burdened with safety announcements in 11 languages. I’m just wondering on what basis these two exclusive languages are chosen. More to the point, I wonder why Afrikaans, which is no more international than Tsonga, should continue to have such a privileged position.
Still up in the air, life in the cockpit seems to be moving ahead slowly. They keep the door shut tight most of the time, so there’s no way of confirming how affirmative action is going, but I have a feeling that now and then there is the odd non-white behind the wheel.
There is also the odd woman, although not, seemingly, the odd black woman. (See how difficult it is to get rid of entrenched categories lodged in your brain?) I was pleased to see that a certain honey-blonde lady was going to be flying the machine I was boarding from Umtata to Jo’burg a few weeks ago – not because she was a honey- blonde, but because she seemed to represent progress in the land.
I was less pleased to hear, in the same week, that one of that airline’s few women pilots had been severely reprimanded because she had been overheard in the cockpit calling one of the ground staff a k….. I wonder if it was the same woman who was piloting me? If so, what did she think about having me and a bunch of other ex-natives on board? How does her mindset contribute to safety in the air? And are we making progress in some areas of liberation, while going nowhere in others, if these easy racial slurs are still part of the samizdat communication of an important section of the population – has the cancer merely been driven underground, not eliminated?
Down on the ground, things are also still comfortably familiar. Most black people continue to live in the townships that were ruthlessly designed for their subjugation by people like Hans Strydom, DF Malan, and CJ Rhodes. We seem to have endorsed this thinking by adding a million more matchboxes to the disarray, and generally continuing to keep most of the darkies in their place.
A number of darkies have moved into the white suburbs. Zero whites have moved into the black townships. This is surprising, given the tough economic climate. In the townships, housing, cars, cellphones and even life itself come cheap. And anyway, if that kind of housing is good enough for some, why isn’t it good enough for all?
Darkies who have moved into the white suburbs are tolerated as long as they understand the rules: no slaughtering of animals in the back yard, no polygamy, and no changing of street names. Maybe in Maputo or Ouagadougou they pulled down all the old signs overnight and named the streets after African leaders like Nelson Mandela, Amilcar Cabral, and Ho Chi Minh. Not here. We stick to our Hans Strydoms, our DF Malans, and our Cecil Rhodes. That’s where we’re coming from. That’s where it’s at.
Education has been a tremendous success story. Now all our children sound like whities when they talk to you. Not nice, English-style whities like the way Dali Tambo or Alyce Chavunduka talk, either. This is local whitey-talk, somewhere between a kugel on a cellphone and a cat sliding down a blackboard. These kids now call their mother “the maid” and stay as late as they can after school so they don’t have to see too much of the family.
Outside the classroom, many things have not changed. Black kids still generally feel that rugby “is for whites” and soccer is the sport that is indigenous to black culture. Given the ongoing struggle to upgrade the history syllabus, they can’t be blamed for not realising that neither of these sports, nor cricket, golf, tennis, and Scrabble, for that matter, existed on these shores before around 1652.
Does it matter whether things are “indigenous” or not? It shouldn’t, but it does. This world is now such a hotchpotch of ideas and images that nobody can truthfully speak out for racial or tribal exclusivity. But everybody does, nevertheless. And so we go on the same way we ever did.
Look at road rage. I used to think that road rage in South Africa was what white males did as an extension of their more general rage about being stuck in Africa. Now everybody’s doing road rage, as if it always belonged to them. But black people are doing it as an extension of their feelings about whites, and vice versa, and all around it’s not a pretty sight.
So, yes, “Simunye the New South Africa!” We are one, but we continue to be one in our separate identities. As the man said: “Quo bloody vadis?”