Rootedness leads to parochialism and xenophobia. Only by abolishing these fake map lines can one gain a sense of genuine belonging, argues Ronald Suresh Roberts
‘WHY are you in this country?” This question is a recurring oar-splash in every foreigner’s South African voyage. ”Aren’t you homesick?” ask the sympathetic. ”Bugger off back to wherever,” say others. All think that foreigners are far from ”home”.
Keith Richburg’s Out of America seemingly confirms this, revelling in homesickness. Seeking simplified roots, Richburg concludes: ”By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today … derives from that one simple and irrefutable truth.”
Yet these questions (Where or what is home? For how long?) cannot be settled only by passports or birthplace. Richburg simply accepts conventional roots-talk, in which the umbilical cords that midwives bury are believed, like fast-growing vines, to bind each of us, apparently forever, to wherever the maternity ward happened to be.
For me, the hospital was in London where my father and mother were law students from Trinidad and Malaysia respectively. We travelled to Trinidad two years later, leaving my buried birth-cord to grow its unknown ways. In this journey, my mother was leaving her Malaysian roots, while her parents had themselves travelled to Malaysia from Kerala, India, in the 1920s.
Arguably I was going ”home,” to my father’s place. But was she? And my father’s Trinidadian roots were themselves relatively recent, traceable to an arriving slave ship.
So the world could appear littered with abandoned umbilical cords, a situation that Trinidadian VS Naipaul (whom Richburg admires) has spent decades melodramatising. Eventually rootedness itself could seem quaint, Naipaul’s hysteria about rootlessness overblown. For writers like Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott and Michael Ondaatje, roots are something we create rather than passively inherit.
In Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses we encounter ”creatures of the air” with ”roots in dreams and clouds, reborn in flight”. His nomadic communities are ”rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home”. Those who speak solemnly of roots, says Gayatri Spivak, ought already to be planting rutabagas.
Roots-talk nourishes parochialism and xenophobia: from recent ”liberal” attacks on ”foreigners” like Graca Machel, to that old settler-bullet slogan, to Institute of Race Relations president Hermann Giliomee’s attack on ”foreign carpet- baggers” (apparently including yours truly).
South Africa must uproot such attitudes. ”First you leave your mother’s house, then you leave the house of the white race,” commented Nadine Gordimer in the Seventies. Rootedness is no end in itself.
Yet desperately seeking rootedness, Richburg boasts that ”the first slaves arrived in Virginia before the Mayflower even set sail”. So what? Blacks were deliberately excluded from ”American” political identity by the 1787 Constitution, which facilitated slavery’s continuance. Until 1952, United States law explicitly confined naturalisation to ”white persons”.
Ironically for Richburg’s argument, it is today a truism that many white Americans are more comfortable with immigrant blacks than indigenous ones.
Moreover, Richburg’s link between birthplace and belonging comforts South African xenophobes. Richburg asks, why on earth did I come here? The xenophobes ask, why on earth don’t you go back? For camps, belonging is inflexibly a synonym for birthplace.
Yet there is a more internationalist South Africanism. Exiled Ruth First said in 1970: ”I don’t feel specially South African. It was just where one happened to meet the issues.”
This reflects Victor Hugo’s aphorism: ”The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”
In this ideal, which Ondaatje calls ”a world without maps”, roots attach us to people, not spaces.
”We are the real countries, not the boundaries,” says a character in The English Patient. While Richburg bashes a continent for not supplying private solace, this ideal presents us with a job of responsibility, an imperative that we ask ourselves where we ought to be – and when.
Conversely, Richburg’s roots-talk merely imports US consumerism into identity issues. Africa is a commodity meant to make him feel good. He almost wants a refund.
It was within the mapless tradition that African National Congress co-founder Sol Plaatje met the British prime minister in 1919 and that Albert Luthuli and Martin Luther King in 1962 made a ”joint appeal” for an ”international quarantine” of apartheid.
Maplessness underlay the radical internationalism of Oliver Tambo and underlies the cosmopolitan savvy of Thabo Mbeki, plus the nomadic achievements of Anthony Sampson and Jim Bailey, the Brits who founded Drum magazine in the Johannesburg Fifties. The tradition includes the painful exile of Zeke Mphahlele, who encountered xenophobia in newly independent Africa and whose lifelong theme is ”the tyranny of place”.
While apartheid’s migration laws were weapons, inflicting alienation and suicide on exiles like Nat Nakasa, mapless South Africanism scoffs at border posts.
This tradition asserts, with Gordimer, that ”my country is the world”. Those born into old privilege, she reminds us, faced the non-belonging of colonial overlordship. They believed that their real world was elsewhere, that they represented Europe in Africa. Only by abolishing such fake mind- map lines is genuine belonging possible.
So it is the hard work of resisting apartheid, and now of reconstruction, not the effortlessness of birthplace, that is the true glue of South Africanism. Most ”foreigners” here today are more South African than Hendrik Verwoerd ever was.
*Ronald Suresh Roberts is author of Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths and co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance