John Matshikiza
With The Lid Off
Haai, nee, man, julle, there you go again. Uncle Madiba has hardly gone into retirement than you’re starting to shout at each other and throw your toys around all over again.
Long ago, it seems, Madiba stunned the world by placing reconciliation above bitterness in our country. Like Paul McCartney’s ebony and ivory keyboard, we were supposed to bury our collective hatchet and live together like grown up South Africans.
Now Max du Preez and a gathering phalanx of women from the Mda clan have burst out into open warfare in the pages of The Star, crying racial foul at each other like the good old barricade days of antagonism.
Max started it all with an article on June 17 that basically staked his claim to being called an African, same as Thabo Mbeki. He needed reassurance that he was being included in the new deal that is supposedly going to result in an “African renaissance” (whatever that is). Fair enough.
Professor Thobeka Mda, a Unisa educationalist and, significantly, convenor of the education and culture commission of the African Renaissance Working Group (so presumably an insider in the renaissance operation) spat back on June 24 by saying that whites could not really be Africans. She justified her position by implying that the said whites could not identify, as she did, with everything that was truly African, citing “my history, my nation, my culture, my customs and religion”, and invoking the names of “Nkrumah, Azikiwe, Cabral, [and] Lumumba”, not to mention “the Rwandans, including the machete-wielding ones” in support of her argument.
Also a fair point, considering that most white people here and abroad would shrink in horror from being identified with the likes of the interahamwe, Idi Amin, and Emperor Bokassa. But then again, I shrink in horror from guys like that as well. Does that diminish my African status, dark skin or no?
Mda starts to lose her argument when she says that “part of being liberated and free [sic] includes the right to name oneself … When Africans use the term `African’ to refer to themselves,” she continues, “they are claiming their right to be called by their correct name.” Now, far be it from me to bang my own drum, but in an article I wrote in the same pages of the same paper on June 11 1994, I pointed out that “African” is not an African word anyway, but originated from the colonising Greeks. But does anyone listen to what anyone says in newspapers? Forget it.
And when she talks about “culture, customs and religion”, what exactly is the good prof talking about? Most black South Africans I know, the “African” ones, that is, live in European-style houses, drive Japanese- or German-style cars, wear American-style clothes from top to toe, and pray to a Middle Eastern God in European- style churches. Even the blacks-only Zionist Christian church is hardly an exception.
As to the idea that freedom “includes the right to name oneself”, Mda makes herself guilty of denying the constitutional rights of a significant section of the population (Max included) who have been going around calling themselves “Afrikaners” for centuries. What does “Afrikaner” mean but “African”?
I know it’s unAfrican of me to break ranks by thinking these thoughts, but, really, isn’t it about time we started seeing things as they are?
Anyway, it seems that in the midst of all this Thobeka Mda’s sister Lizeka, a former Mail & Guardian person, now an editor at The Star, published an article in the Rhodes Journalism Review defending, in Max’s words, the “blacks-only policy” of the Forum for Black Journalists. Max made the mistake of lumping the Mda sisters together in an anti-white corner in his column on July 8. Under the headline “Sisters, you’ve got it so wrong” (Max, like the rest of us, does not necessarily write his own headlines), he went deeper into the doo-doo by invoking the name of the late Steve Biko to his cause, in a complicated argument that I found rather difficult to follow.
Well, my dear, that was enough for Lizeka. She sprang into the debate on July 6 with a leader page article in the same paper telling Max to “mind your own baas business”. She too had a fair enough point when she asked the former Vrye Weekblader why he chose to drag her name so publicly through the mud “when I had nothing to do with the debate in question”. But she then went out of her way to make it clear to Max that he, being an “oh-so-full-of-himself white male”, had less than zero right to even speak about Steve Biko. Biko is ours.
What is going to be said next? And why is all this happening in the same paper? Do they have nothing to talk about in the tea room that they have to air all this bad and unpleasant business in public? What is going to be achieved?
If I can return to my own humble words from five years ago, my proposal then was that the whole “African”/”non-African” debate was far too intractable to sort out in our own lifetimes. “The only sound thing we can say about ourselves and about each other,” I wrote, “is that we are, for better or worse, South African.”
But judging by this current non-debate, where neither side listens to the other because they are all shouting so loud, it seems that even that is not true. Which, of course, is what Mbeki was saying in the first place when he spoke in Parliament of South Africa being “a country of two nations”. Which is where Max came in, and started all the trouble – even though he isn’t even a native.
Or is he?