Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
I have been trying to read the “discussion” on the Daily Mail & Guardian website, on Chris McGreal’s article in The Guardian under the headline “The hate that won’t go away” (reproduced in the Mail & Guardian as “Abuse deeply routed in the land”, July 30 to August 5), and quite frankly, I wish I hadn’t.
Is this disgusting stuff what some white South Africans take for “discussion” on a public forum? They don’t seem able to string together a couple of sentences without throwing in torrents of horrendous abuse. This is straightforward guttersnipe hate mail.
Actually, I blame the moderator. About 99% of the writers are “anonymous”. Now, if people have such strong feelings to express, why don’t they have the strength of their convictions and reveal their true identities?
Anonymity can be useful in bringing out hidden feelings. But who in South Africa thinks that racist feelings are a hidden phenomenon? Allowing a host of anonymous racists to pour their horrendous vituperation on the unsuspecting public is a con. If I wanted to read loads of racist rubbish, I could go to the Ku Klux Klan site.
Besides, anonymity allows people to play games with the feelings of others. If they were to be found out, they would no doubt plead that they were engaging in “harmless” wordplay. Just like shooting a six-month- old baby and saying you thought it was a guinea fowl rummaging in the brush.
These people frighten me. Their words are murder weapons clothed in pixels. That the country that shot people in the back at Sharpeville 40 years ago still nurtures such people, and that their cowardice is not more generally recognised for what it is fills me with depression.
Maybe I’ve been naive. For on my first visit to South Africa I experienced a bit of the racist aberration that rules this country. I was having a drink at the bar at Lanseria airport, surrounded by white males. The bar lady was scrupulous in making sure we were each served in turn. This annoyed some of the white males, who wanted her to bypass me. However, she was quite firm in rebuffing them, saying sternly: “I am serving my customer!”
Then one of the guys started a conversation with me. He said he was a cargo pilot who often went to Accra, and we were soon having a great chat about Robert Mugabe’s Ghanaian wife and how she allegedly gave them business.
The others couldn’t help overhearing us. In no time at all, I heard one of them whisper, “Hey, this men speaks the Queen’s English!” So, now they didn’t mind if I was served in my turn?
On another occasion, I complained to the manager of the private apartment complex in which I lived that I thought my phone charges were excessively high. Hotels are allowed, for some unknown reason, to charge you about 10 times the normal phone charge, even if you dial the damned phone yourself. But I didn’t expect a private apartment, which had installed a direct line for my use, to be doing that.
This white manager went apoplectic. It hit me like a bullet: this guy actually didn’t expect me to be a rational being who knows the difference between a legitimate charge and cheating. He’s doing me a “favour” by taking my money and allowing me to sleep in a place that has been advertised publicly, isn’t he?
This pervasive racism even affects the attitudes of black people. Once I was working late in an office and asked the black driver of my host politely to go and buy a beer for me. I didn’t hear any more of it. It later bounced back to me from the wife of my host that I should have passed my request through her or her husband!
It made me laugh. For in Accra or Lagos, that driver would have hooked on to me as the potential source of a lot of “dash” (tips). But in South Africa, he probably feared that his employers would regard his hobnobbing with another black man as treason. “Keep the black servants apart!” A line from Doris Lessing?
On another occasion, I attended the book launch of a white friend of mine. This guy goes everywhere, knows everybody. But the only other black person, apart from me, at his book launch was the driver of an ambassador. When I tried to talk to this other black guy, his boss came from nowhere and said quite firmly, “We must go now, Emmanuel.” The guy got the message and fled from me fast.
You see, social behaviour is something that one carries about unconsciously. It is different from the intellectual commitment one might have made not to indulge in racist behaviour. The cure is to deconstruct one’s attitudes.
Why has one always accepted that certain members of society, who just happen to be different in colour, should be so undereducated, and thereby so unemployable, that they will cook for you gratefully, look after your children gratefully, watch your gates gratefully, keep your garden gratefully, drive for you gratefully, maybe become your sex slaves gratefully – for whatever pay you are kind enough to give them? Why is it that members of your own race will not take such jobs from you, or if they would, you couldn’t afford to pay them?
Maybe you will begin to understand where your black fellow citizens are coming from when they discuss political and economic issues: who should hold what job; how much he or she should be paid; what the government needs to do; what the media need to do.
Oh, by the way, if you don’t agree with me, please don’t insult me. Tell me why! OK?