A six-year-old should not have to bear the legacy of apartheid, writes Palesa Morudu from the Mother City
Cape Town almost always springs a surprise on one. When I heard that government was lamenting that the Mother City has been slow to catch on to the vuvuzela, I wondered whether the executive had observed this lack of enthusiasm during its monthly jets into our city to attend Cabinet meetings. But, then again, if I attended those meetings, I would also have a bleak view of things soccer and otherwise.
So it was with pride that I joined tens of thousands of fans in Slaapstad on a football Friday and witnessed an unbelievable passion for the beautiful game and our boys Bafana Bafana. Cape Town, at its outrageous best, was out blowing the vuvus no end.
Downtown was yellow and the number 12 player proudly said “Re Bafana kaofela” — “We are all Bafana”. It was simply beautiful! But things soon got back to normal after our magic one-all draw with Mexico.
The toilet revolution continued in Khayelitsha, the north-westerly blew bitterly through the Cape Flats shacks, and everyone sort of continued with their business.
I go to a gym in Westlake. It is a swank Virgin Active outfit with a fabulous kiddies section. I often drop off my six-year-old there while I train for marathons — and just to generally keep up with him. For these soccer-crazed holidays, the gym is running a great kiddies programme where you can leave little ones for up to three hours, three times a week, for a clinic of unadulterated football fun. I dutifully signed him up.
But, this being South Africa, and particularly Cape Town, the beautiful game was bound eventually to get entangled with the national question. As I picked my child up from the clinic, he was engaged in what seemed like an animated conversation with a pretty little girl of the same age.
She screamed obnoxiously: “I am white and you are brown!”
The response was equally loud: “I know that — so what?”
All the adults, workers at the gym and myself, were frozen — shocked. The manager had a chat with the little girl. My child gathered all his stuff; he seemed quite unperturbed by the spectacle. Off he went with his other friends.
Later I told a friend what had just happened and she advised me to raise this with the management of the gym, which I did. The word from the management was that they had spoken to the mother of the girl and she told them that it probably was an innocent comment, because this girl’s best friend was black. I almost said, “Well, you know, some of my best friends are white — and homosexual too.”
I hoped to treat this silly incident as a non-event. But childish innocence brought it back to reality. While brushing his teeth before bed, my son dropped a bombshell: “Why am I brown? I don’t want to be brown!”
I froze for the second time. And then I made it into a non-issue. I told him he was gorgeous, which is true.
It was at this very same gym, almost a year ago, that two little white kids ran to their mom to enquire if “this is our new maid” — in reference to me. The mother and I looked at each other silently across the gulf of South Africanness: that which separates us as normal people.
But my child is six. He doesn’t need the burden of the apartheid legacy and the guilt and hurt that comes along with it. He just wants to play, to make some really good friends, to cheer on Teko Modise, Mamelodi Sundowns and Manchester United.
So, as we fly the South African flag high, let us watch what we say at home in front of the little ones when we have dinner conversations while watching horrible news on SABC TV about the miserable state of our nation.
Black and white coexist in our country, separated still; and, for a long time, Africans will suffer the indignity of the toilet revolution while white people enjoy nice football at Green Point stadium and then drive home safely on roads in good condition. This is our reality, which we suffer thanks to the previous generations, and we have to confront it head-on.
But please leave the children out of it. Don’t corrupt their precious minds, because you can trust the child to show you up in strange places — what you put in is really what you will get out.
The true measure of any social cohesion that might result from this World Cup is much more than the mirror flags on many fancy cars, or the black and white faces blowing vuvus at our good-looking stadiums. It must be about that six-year-old girl at the Westlake gym being devoid of any consciousness of her pigmentation and therefore unable to attach any value to this natural phenomenon — and just simply blow the vuvu with her friends.
This must be the social legacy of this African World Cup.